Your view of the quality of the stories will always be biased toward what you respond to.
Personally I thought the Demacia update was overall good. But Galio’s lore was near nonsensical if you give it a moment’s thought.
Characters like Kayn, Zoe, and the love birds are either everything you want in a character or the most annoying childish champions Riot has ever released. Depending on who you ask.
The MF and Darius comics were good. The Nami and Ziggs/Jinx comics bored me.
The only character I am at all interested in within Zaun was Urgot. His lore was... acceptable. They removed the interesting parts of his character to make him more of a stereotypical badass thug. Which is fine, I guess. It just isn’t the Urgot I originally liked.
Then there’s the Varus update. Which is a hotbed. On the face of it, there really isn’t any more actual depth to the story told in either versions. So it will come down to which personally you felt attached to. A man who loses his family for the sake of duty. Or the inclusion of homosexuality in the lore. Both are fine. They are just not the same thing, anyone who claims the new just expands on the old is lying to themselves.
Now the writing quality has improved. They’ve started writing the lore like actual stories, with more than the basic details. That is pretty much indisputable. Whether you like the stories being told is ultimately up to you.
Personally, I’d say there are more bad than good. But what good there is can be pretty great.
Edit: oh and forgot a positive. Taken in a vacuum, Ornn’s lore does myth building better than anything else Riot has tried. It’s better than the mysterious mysticism of Illaoi. It’s more interesting than the two psychopomps, and blows Targon away in just about every conceivable category to compare the two.
However, I’m going to guarantee that when Volibear gets rewritten completely you’ll see a response not unlike Varus. Now Varus’ will be bigger, undoubtedly. But a shaman trying to tame his own people and create a better tomorrow is so far removed from the thousand pierces bear, or whatever he was called, that they have no actual similarities anymore.
