What is power creep in general?
The gradual unbalancing of a game due to successive releases of new content, leaving the older ones underpowered. (taken from Wiktionary)
Now what is power creep in dota?
- free courier for everyone
- free ward and cheap sentries that give a huge dewarding gold
- introduction of stun timer so you can stack stun on top of another with ease
- free tp slot
- backpack slots
- introduction of neutral items
- neutral items that give movement speed so you can drop boot and get 1 more item
- shard
- consumable aghs
If you are a really fat core, you can have 6 slots with shard, aghs, moonshard and a very strong neutral item.
If you are a supp, you no longer only have brown boots till the throne falls like the old days. You can be impactful in laning, ganking, mid game team fight, strong in late game. You can kite around since you are not poor buying wards anymore.
Now imagine yourself in 2016. Supps were dirt poor with only brown boots 40 min into the game and they would die 2s into battle. Enemy cores only have 4 item slots since boots, tps take 2 slots. No shard, no talent, no neutral items, no aghs so spells were not as strong and the battles were easier to approach. BKB was not that big of a deal back then. Remember people memeing about "mY cOrE dOeSn'T bUy bKB" and cores having "BKB IS FOR PUSSAYYY" mentality for literal years because the meta has always been that way?
I fully understand the frustration of seeing bkb rush every game but dota hasn't really got a real gameplay/ meta defining update in years. The problem is not bkb.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/vfe5ii/bkb_is_not_the_problem_the_real_problem_is_power/