HBO tried to make the line go up by cutting two episodes off the second season in the midst of the writer's strike. Like no exaggeration, the season 2 finale ends in a way that makes it immediately obvious two more episodes were supposed to exist. They were simply truncated along with the all the payoff for many of this season's character arcs and plot lines.
One of the writers even made a statement that an eight episode season wasn't their decision. Unfortunately the news of that must have hit them too late in production to fully accommodate that in the writing.
Except on all the subreddits for this show, the prevailing opinion amongst dipshit redditors is that the writers are cutting book events to make time for LGBTQ asoiaf fanfiction.
While that'd be based if true, it's not. Like wtf? Do these people live in a different universe? Are they watching a different dragon show? Redditors ain't alright, man. These people watch the enshittification of media in real time, and their lack of media literacy results in them going on queerphobic witch hunts and throwing wild assignment of blame at anything but HBO and capitalism.
I'm pretty sure it's written with the conceit that it's a historical document, rather than in the style of a traditional novel, so the granularity isn't at a level that necessarily includes secret love affairs, and even some elements that are included could theoretically be character assassination in universe by a biased historian.
Like one character in the book is noted to have died after falling off her horse, and in the show she is murdered on screen by another character.
I believe they've also changed some things (folding two characters into one, making characters more or less influential, etc), which, to be clear, isn't a value judgement, I think that is often a good idea for an adaptation.
Mushroom only tells the truth, especially when he says his dick is as big as his head.