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I am morbidly-curious now that you mention this. I've only ever watched the first season of the anime and I left off in the manga when they introduced the anti-human 3DMG. I'm roughly aware that AOT goes to some weird places, and I know from watching Ironmouse that Eren does Some Shit(tm) that was apparently guaranteed to turn the audience against him.
You should watch at least the first 3 seasons; they really are something special.
I should be able to explain what I mean in a mostly spoiler-free way. The creator of Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama, binged Game of Thrones in 2016 and got really into it, even saying that the ending of his story would be inspired by the show.
There's a point in the story where the themes and style of storytelling vastly shift and not for the better. This coincides with the split between season 3 and the "final season" and there's an easy visual cue to tell when it happened because a different studio took over animating the show. This also coincides with around when Isayama got into Game of Thrones and it started influencing his writing.
I would summarize the original themes of the show (Seasons 1-3) as RAGE, SCREAM, FIGHT. There is something existential coming for you and it won't leave a single one of you left alive. Your 'leaders' think it best if your people quietly went extinct, and as you learn they are far from the only ones... Fight with your lives and with everything at your disposal, even if it means literally turning into your mortal enemy. There are times when good friends have to fight eachother but the mission is never in question because those are the stakes. This and the military imagery gave the show heavy nationalist themes and the series began to be criticized at the end of season 3 once certain interpretations became circulated online. I found it to be extremely refreshing compared to what I'm used to.
The post-GOT era show has heavy Martin themes. War is bad and you'll be heavy-handedly browbeaten for liking the cool parts with the sobering reality of characters you like dying. Morality is very grey all of a sudden. Killing others is wrong, even if they all want you dead... it feels quite incongruent with the earlier themes of the show, even with the story that the author laid out. These themes may sound better to you as you read this but consider that they are kludged onto a work that was saying the exact opposite things for so long. It's a different bill of goods now.
I should elaborate on the storytelling changes as well. Attack on Titan's narrative framing ties you and Eren very closely together. Later this expands so you get the POV of a few other main characters at times, but the important thing is that you and the characters are almost always on the same page. You know what they know, you discover the mystery together. This was the style of storytelling until the shift I talked about, at which point it becomes basically... Game of Thrones.
Tons of characters. You don't follow characters, you check in with them to see where they are with their story. Your relationship to Eren is completely broken as he goes from being the POV character to someone you don't see the inner world of outside of 4 episodes or so. You're catching up with his plans like everyone else is. This is pretty much exactly how Martin does it and the style has its merits... just not on something that did it differently for most of its existence. This is harder to articulate for most people but I think it's why the new seasons are so jarring.
As for the ending of Eren doing Something Crazy — this is certainly where the show was going from the start. His words to a certain betraying friend are downright genocidal in rhetoric. I think in a world without the influence of Martin it'd be framed much differently by the narrative, which would make for some interesting discourse online.
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I'm not sure anyone with thematic sense should have been expecting Eren to not go into a bad place. The way it gets there is weirder than the resolution that a super-angry kid who turns into a race of cannibals goes to a bad place when worldviews are shattered.
Western young adult literature it was never going to be.
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Oh see I thought that, like many things in AoT, the ending where Erin Does Shit (which I also haven't seen yet) was going to be Evangelion-adjacent.
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