It's worth noting that the Lakers' record while LeBron was in the lineup last year wasn't good enough to make the Playoffs. After he declared "Playoff Mode Activated", they didn't exactly set the league on fire, either. Anthony Davis has made a huge difference, and he'll probably never get the credit he deserves for that.
Let's also not pretend that this is the toughest the West has ever been. For years, teams in the West were missing the Playoffs with winning records. One season, 50 wins wasn't enough to secure a spot in the top eight out West. That doesn't make this impending title illegitimate or an asterisk or anything else like that - I think that stuff is petty - but it isn't the tough path/underdog triumph that a lot of talking heads are desperately trying to paint it as.
For all the talk of how we get caught up in nostalgia and the past, a lot of people are prisoners of the moment. It's also fallacious to dismiss past criticisms that were accurate at the time, based on current events where circumstances have changed. For example, if someone is a career 40% free throw shooter, and then they suddenly have a breakout year where they're knocking down a bunch of them at an 80% clip, it doesn't retroactively make criticisms of them being a poor free throw shooter inaccurate. It'd be erroneous if someone was
still making that claim following their improvement, but it's no less accurate in retrospect.
By the numbers, LeBron's path to the Finals in the East
was easier than that of the teams coming out of the West. His path through the West this year is likewise easier than it was in previous years. Like i said though, the Lakers still had to show up and get the job done, and you can only play the competition that presents itself. A ring's a ring, but if anyone wants to assert that the Lakers are massive underdogs this year, or that this was an historically difficult road to a championship, that's simply not true.