re: I seriously am in shock reading this board with the negative opinions

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That was an all timer episode of TV

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For what reasons?

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If for no other reason, the fact that it was a mammoth production that surpassed most contemporary feature films in terms of visual presentation and effects.
Go watch the "making of" link. There's very little CGI in this. Basically, the actual dragon, the wide angle shot of King's Landing from above, and maybe the Iron Fleet at sea. And I guess the arrows maybe.

They built the main street and a lot of alleyways as a complete set, preemptively damaged and then completed it in full repair, so that they could keep filming it in various states of destruction.
Dragonfire? They filmed a high pressure flamethrower that they moved around, from 8 different cameras, to get all sorts of different dragon bursts, and they layered it into the final images. They also filmed a lot of explosives and integrated that with the fire footage. They built half-scale models of the front gate and blew it up. They used real stuntmen on fire, falling off walls or rolling on the ground, not CGI animation.

They fricking hired amputees and put prosthetics over their stumps with fake blood, so that you really do film some people without arms and legs crawling away from the carnage, instead of altering it digitally afterwards.

Somebody commented something to the effect of 'yeah, if you like big explosions and all, but the story sucks'. But this isn't a Michael Bay movie, or a Peter Jackson movie, or a Marvel Avengers movie. It's episode 5 of a TV series, in a season where we've already had one big budget battle already. Not that long ago, the producers joked about not having the resources to do an undead bear, and now we get both this and the battle of Winterfell in the same season.