I'm sure most people here would agree that cancelling Game of Thrones once they ran out of source material and waiting for the books to be done (lol) would have been preferable to what we got.
GoT would have exited the cultural zeitgeist a lot sooner than it did, probably to the detriment of future viewer engagement and thus a source of revenue for HBO, which is why they pushed it forward, but still...
I don't think that math worked out for them. After season 8 GoT just vanished from the public mind, at least in my experience. The show was so terrible in the end, they would have made a lot more money in a 5 year hiatus selling merch than they got from running the show to completion.
Compare it to the lord of the rings for example. They got a rescan, color correction, more bonus content and a 4k release 20 years after the first movie came out. I doubt we will get anything comparable for game of thrones. No one pulls out the DVDs to watch game of thrones once a year. Plenty of LOTR fans do.
The annoying thing is, watching House of the Dragon now, it didn't have to be that bad, clearly they can do good stuff with minimal source material, but the GoT writers didn't have it in them.