That was in my original draft, but yes he isn’t very realistic with his world building. A lot of his characters seem like modern people in a fantasy setting.
This goes in both directions. Stories taking place in the past, or some alternative fantasy setting in the past, have the authors project their own modern political and social ideas of the world on their fantasy setting. So GRRM makes abortion like a centerpiece and integral aspect of life in Westeros and moon tea more common than apple cider. Because he sees a modern world where abortion is a prominent political issue amongst leftist and communist types. So he cannot separate his deranged baby killing obsession from medieval fantasy and so the worlds merge into a mess of storytelling.
But writers also project their own worldviews and biases on future settings as well. Like the modern versions of Star Wars and Star Trek are obviously centered around modern politics and modern events to the point where the writing is beyond direct and obvious. Even the Star Wars Prequels had obscene references to the Global War on Terror and Bush/Cheney. To the point where some of the plot points were more '2004 Election' than 'Star Wars'. It was distracting to watch Star Wars characters fire out quotes from Donald Rumself and John Ashcroft.
You could argue it also takes place in the present as well. With things like The Boys being extreme leftwing fantasies about contemporary society. Or pretty much every single show that takes place in current society being overloaded with race mixing, transgenders, sodomites, furries, and whatever fag or mongrel group is being hyper over-represented. You would think that 50% of romances are between furries and fags and miscegenators and so on based on the representation on modern television shows.
When you are writing a story and that story becomes secondary to inserting modern politics and social narratives....then you are really just writing social commentary and propaganda using some other setting. It gets more grotesque when the setting is something you are bastardizing. GRRM made his own shallow mediocre fantasy world of Westeros. So it is his world to write incest fantasies and fecal infatuations. It becomes pathetic when dead authors who cannot defend their own worlds like Tolkien or Herbert or even Shakespeare have their works used as vehicles to promote ideas that they themselves strongly were opposed to. These no talent losers in Hollywood that write nigger and fag stories, or race or gender swapping, in LOTR, Dune, Shakespeare, Lovecraft, and other worlds that they are basically stealing are beyond despicable.
That's the thing. An ending as bad as Game of Thrones will never not be memorable. It will always be remembered. In sports we remember the big winners. The walkoff homeruns. The buzzer beaters. The huge knockouts. But we also remember the choke artists. The meltdowns. The guys who drop the ball or fumble the ball. The bad pass call instead of running it at the one-yard-line. The last lap crashes when you are in first place. People remember the extreme good and extreme bad in almost everything. You will remember an incredible meal for your 20th wedding anniversary but also the time you got three weeks of food poisoning and had to be hospitalized. How much do you remember in between?
Game of Thrones itself is culturally irrelevant. No one will watch the show again. No one cares about the books. No one cares about the prequels outside of diehard sycophant delusional losers. No one cares about GRRM's story. No one will pack in Game of Thrones references in their own stories like they still do for LOTR, Alien, Dune, Shakespeare, Lovecraft, and so on. No one cares despite the delusions of HBO executives bragging about how the show is still the most streamed show of all time and still popular.
But people care about GRRM's meltdown as an author as like a cautionary tale. They care about the horrendous writing and ending of Game of Thrones because they were so invested in the story as it happened live. And people are fascinated by a trainwreck. By the phenomenal collapse of such a cultural powerhouse and juggernaut was entertaining and exciting. Talking about the collapse of Game of Thrones will almost always be interesting if you were there. In another generation or two when no one has seen the show it will die out socially and vanish most likely. But right now the ending of the show, not the show itself, is its cultural relevance.
But the disastrous end of Game of Thrones and the impending demise of the novels will always be hilarious to some and horrific to others. I have seen the last season of Game of Thrones once. So seven hours of watching it total or whatever? Yet I have spent probably dozens of hours enjoying the disintegration and utter ruination of the series in the eyes of virtually everyone. It is like reliving a moment in sports where someone blows the game at the last second. I still laugh every time someone on a forum or media references Bran saying "why do you think I came all this way?".
