[2021] The real reason for the lack of balance changes?

After reading the patch notes, I strongly suspect that the real reason behind the lack of balance changes is money. Riot looked at the numbers and determined that people who spend significant money on the game don’t like it when they see their stuff nerfed. Mogwai also hinted at this in his review of the patch notes.

Every F2P game (especially mobile games) is largely driven by whales and developers will cater to them because that is how they get paid.

When they say “we love the play pattern of Irelia / Azir, as well as Blade Dance. We’ve learned that a ton of players love it too, and we want to keep the feel of the deck intact,” they mean it. It’s a money printer.

This also leads me to believe that Aphelios was not a money printer and that’s why he was gutted and left to rot. Can we at least make him 3/3 again?