It's easy to point and smirk at the quality of someone else's codebase from a distance. But as a long time player of League, it's been very rare that a software bug has affected my enjoyment of the game. The quality of my internet connection and the state of balance have always been matters with significantly more impact.

I further think that Riot often doesn't get credit for the things they do right. I remember back in the day they were rolling out patches weekly, with a 12 hour maintenance window a la WoW on Tuesdays. That fell to half that time, then a third, and has at this point been gone for years. Cheating is a major problem in any current multiplayer game (PUBG has been getting hit hard recently I hear), but it's never been big enough in League that I felt the effects.

Riot has managed to build the biggest gaming phenomena outside of Minecraft in the last decade, and I'd expect corners to be cut in doing that. Clean code doesn't win a startup race, and games are a cut-throat business (see: Epic's Fortnite rolling out a battle Royale mode in a span of months following the success of PUBG). It's a good thing, imo, that Riot can afford the time and energy to start cleaning their code, and are willing to share some parts of that process with the wider world.