To be fair, we don't have any idea where the story's going apart from that it won't be what the show did (there's an author statement that the "big five" - Jon, Arya, Daenerys, Bran, and Tyrion - all survive). We don't even know where the Meereen arc specifically is going, except that where the show clutched pearls over anti-slaver violence the books kept showing and then explicitly saying that tepid reformism and collaboration with the erstwhile slaver aristocracy was a catastrophic mistake.

GRRM's a brainwormed lib, but not as bad as the absolute hack libs the showrunners were. He's at least got the cynicism to know the world he's writing about is bad instead of getting swept up in the epic romantic fantasy of it all like they did, and takes the time to explicitly point out how completely fucked every aspect of feudal society is.

He is, however, permanently stuck in a place that I can only articulate as "somewhat better than most of his contemporaries were in the 80s and 90s" in terms of problematic content. If he'd finished the series in the 90s we'd be looking at it and thinking "wow, it's got its creepy moments but it's not as bad as most old fantasy like that is."

Edit: I just came across this comment on r/asoiaf about, well, literally this topic, that lays out some other details

For what it's worth, Daenerys's 'show ending' is one of the elements we can conclude doesn't come from GRRM's 'ending notes':

• D&D have said outright that Jon killing Daenerys was their idea - and that they had it around the time of S3, which is two full years before GRRM actually sat down with them to tell them his own ending plans.

• The original shooting script does NOT have Dany go 'mad' and torch all of King's Landing. She does go somewhat ruthless and ceases to care about civilian casualties when going after fleeing Lannister troops (who are trying to use civvies as human shields), but that's as far as it goes. The systematic burning of King's Landing - the actual 'Dany goes insane' element - was created in post production.

• Another thing to take into consideration is that she can't actually do what she did in the show - her dragons are still basically babies in the books. Even Drogon, who is the biggest, is barely large enough for a 15 year old girl to actually ride at the end of ADWD. He's decades away from becoming the Balerion-sized living nuke he became in the show. It'd take book-Drogon weeks to torch king's landing on his own. Dany's dragons are 'potential future nukes', but unless there's a VERY long time skip before the end, they're just not going to be as big of a 'military advantage' for Dany as they were depicted to be in the show - not only are they too young to burn entire armies/fleets on their own, they're small enough that they can be hurt by 'conventional weapons' - they're only 3 years old. We know during the Dance of Dragons that Stormcloud - a 8-9 year old dragon - was still vulnerable to 'regular' arrows.

Also fuck, the context that the showrunners came up with that ending while still malding over Emilia Clarke renegotiating her contract so she wouldn't have to do nude scenes anymore just adds to what absolute pieces of shit they were.