https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/game-of-thrones-season-8-what-is-plot-armorThis is a dumb article. Well, not entirely. I more or less agree with this general sentiment:
But the rise of "plot armor" in describing Game of Thrones, along with the equally irritating and sexist use of "Mary Sue," feels like it's part of a larger, more insidious trend in pop culture writing of ceding the linguistic ground to a specific strand of pedantic, know-it-all fandom. Many of the storytelling tics cataloged on a site like TV Tropes are fun to identify and joke about among friends -- the shorthand can also be useful in calling out harmful stereotypes and lazy narrative shortcuts -- but merely being able to identify a resemblance to other classic stories does not necessarily mean the story is doing something "wrong." Over eight seasons, you'd think Game of Thrones would've earned some critical wiggle room, and it's frustrating to see the show get dinged for the type of "sins" you'd find in one of those terminally unfunny and performatively savvy YouTube videos like "Everything Wrong with Star Wars: The Last Jedi" or "10 Dumbest Harry Potter Plot Holes."
There's more to the criticism of "plot armor" than just the main characters happening to survive, and it's disingenuous to summarize it as that. The problem, as I've heard echoed all over the Internet, is that the episode kept dropping the mains into situations where they seemed to be about to die and inexplicably cutting back to them later doing fine. It's not like this complaint has been a constant refrain throughout the show. Remember "The Watchers on the Wall," the big battle from the fourth season? Sam survived that battle, and I don't recall there being a backlash about him having plot armor, because the episode gave a satisfactory account of how he managed to pull through it. He ran, he hid, he and Gilly watched each other's backs, he used his environment effectively, and so on. In this episode, he was in the thick of things, constantly surrounded by aggressive enemies, more competent soldiers being overpowered and killed in mere seconds on either side of him, and the show doesn't bother giving an explanation as to how he survived beyond the fact that he apparently just did. That's lazy. I get that in the limited time they had they couldn't give every character a compelling subplot about how they survived the battle, but if they weren't able to do Sam justice, then they shouldn't have included him. They could have put him in the crypt and let him talk to Tyrion and Sansa.
I put part of the blame on Martin. The way he set things up are much better for telling a story than it is for finishing that story.
It's not helped by his last two books padding out the storyline and introducing new subplots instead of advancing the story significantly. I can't imagine him being able to provide a satisfactory conclusion in just two more books, and at this point I doubt he's even particularly interested in finishing the series.