This is a great article - and Martin may have fallen into the machinations of TV world and set TV structures. He might've pushed for a less cinematic finish, but no producer would've let him.
GOT broke a lot of the mold for TV, some things they did like Killing Ned, poisoning Joffrey and stabbiing Rob Stark are so against the grain of how TV is supposed to go that it gathered viewers and kept them hooked for ages. You don't kill off main characters for no good reason, but because it was in the books - they did. TV viewers were thrown off balance.
But there had to be some resolution - and they absolutely ballsed it up. They took this carefully created world and broke all the rules. It takes Bran 4 seasons to go beyond the wall, but by season 7 they can send a crow to Kings Landing from beyond the wall and have an army come find them within ten minutes. The carefully orchestrated world was written apart by the expedience of TV and the ending was rushed.
The slow and gradual turning of Daeneyrs into a fully fledged mad Queenc could've been seeded much earlier, and might've been possible in the books if you get insight into her thought processes and spend more time with her - but a little like the breaking of the geographic rules, they broke all the character rules. She did have to die, the narrative demanded it - but she didn't have to die like that.
There were two dramatic questions that needed to be answered that were set up in the first episode. 1. Who will be on the throne after the game is finished and 2. Can we save the world? If you answer these questions in the wrong order (and they did) you get a damp squib of a TV ending. Once you've saved the world, who gives a shit what happens about the diplomatic falling out? Denerys should've gone out fighting the Night King in the final episode, as the defacto queen of the seven kingdoms and wisely named Bran as her successor into the bargain.
The final season of GOT was one of the most reviled pieces of TV in modern history. It didn't do the detailed characters of the book any justice, nor did it try and stick to the rules that had brought it any success. It didn't even succeeed in following the formula for what makes a successful climax to a TV show. The whole thing should've been thrown in the bin and re-shot.
