It looks to me like every season was more popular than the last[1]. Do you mean that just the end of the last season was bad, and it was so bad that people immediately stopped talking about it when it finished?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episod...
Exactly this. Pretty much no other show has disappeared so completely from the zeitgest after it was over. People are actively not talking about it and aren't recommending it to their friends because of how very very very bad the last 1-2 seasons were.
Regular fans without meta knowledge got pissed about the bad and ill-fitting ending to their favourite story. The one that they had watch-parties for and theoretised with their friends between episodes. Even during COVID lockdowns when everyone had watched everything on every streaming platform, no-one bothered to rewatch Game of Thrones.
Mega-fans knew the behind the scene things. Like the fact that HBO was literally throwing money at Benioff & Weiss to make two more seasons in order to finish the story according to the original plan they agreed with and GRRM approved. But they wanted to go make a Star Wars trilogy instead so they rushed the ending. Which went so badly that Disney dropped them from the planned SW project. Now they're doing a Three Body Problem TV show for Tencent, because no western studio would hire them.
I never watched the show, but the conversations my friends had about its last season match the conclusions of Lindsay Ellis' second video about GOT[1], namely, "yes, the ending has ruined it all". As she puts it:
> What is the legacy of GOT going to be? Because there are endings that ruin a story in hindsight. I used to watch and rewatch the earlier seasons of the show. But now, knowing how it ends, knowing what they are building towards, knowing how nihilistic and stupid and mean it ends up being, there is just no enjoyment in the journey even anymore. Even in the very long process of making these two episodes, rewatching old GOT was just an exercise in frustration because you know now that the buildup that they are going towards has little or no payoff.
Sadly, I think their failure to finish GoT properly screwed their star wars movie ambition too....
Edit: spelling
Why being sad about it? Seems like a proper punishment.