As much as I enjoy the show, ASOIAF might be finished now if it had never been adapted to TV, and I'd rather live in that world.

I think he was always heading for this.

His editor should have reined him in a decade or two ago. The Mereenese Knot was their last big moment to intervene or for GRRM to swallow his pride and reach out for help. He might have had that in Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham at one point but that boat has loooong since sailed.

He needed a collaborator or a ghostwriter.

He's a gardener and he doesn't know when to prune shit back so now he doesn't have a storyline anymore, he has an overgrown jungle of weeds that is so interlocking that there is no path forward but hacking it all down to the roots, except he cannot do that for obvious reasons.

If he had a good editor who put him in a shorter leash, they could have told him to axe storylines and characters here and there to avoid this mess but now the current situation makes the Mereeneese Knot look like a bowtie.

The one way that the series is semi-recoverable is if GRRM took players off the board and sent them to faraway lands to gallivant or to go study cloistered away from the plot and things like that, where the narrative streams past them but never touches them again for the main books (except maybe in passing nods or throwaway mentions). Then what GRRM could have done is to write that characters story as a spinoff novella, like a Dunk & Egg book, so that he can flesh out their plot without leaving it as a loose end but also he can finish the damn book without being so tied up that he has no room to move. Except he is far too prideful and he lacks the self-control and maybe even the self-awareness to know that this is the one hail mary option left to him to get himself out of a hole that he has been digging for himself with every chapter he wrote since at least the first book.

He's been working on a Dunk and Egg story called The She-Wolves of Winterfell" (sounds dope) for like fifteen years