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Notes -
Jordan died from a rare disease. That's very different from GRRM and Rothfuss who are alive and well, but appear to have gotten terminal writer's block and/or lost interest in completing the series.
That's very fair. Jordan's problem before the illness wasn't lack of interest, it was so much interest that every book seemed to get 25% longer than the previous despite covering 25% less ground.
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It seems to me that for many writers the fun is kind of in making up the story as you go along. JK Rowling who has had a pretty consistent regular output for 30+ years now, along with those thriller writers like Coben who churn out books on the regular, seem to do this - you can tell because they all suffer from the kind of plot holes that would be easily avoided if the whole story was very tightly plotted before the bulk of the writing began. They will usually have an idea of the vague events and ending, but most of what happens in terms of scene to scene or location to location stuff is probably decided at the time of writing.
By contrast, I think Martin probably suffers from the opposite problem. My suspicion is that he has known exactly how this story plays out in relatively minute detail (whether or not he shared all that detail with the show creators) for a long time because his great joy is world building, to the point that the actual writing is no longer a creative exercise in the same way. All that is left is hanging the prose of dialogue, description and second-to-second mechanical stage direction on the frame that he’s had in his head for many years, which is distinctly unsatisfying when one’s passion is imagining the setting and the grand sweep of events therein.
Classic pulp fiction and YA and mystery and adventure writers who churned out hundreds of books almost never cared about worldbuilding. Agatha Christie, Clive Cussler, these types had supporting characters come and go, backstories shift, large background elements were taken up and discarded, continuity was often broken with regularity to the point that even the ages of the protagonists often didn’t seem to make sense.
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