I feel like the concept of elements countering one another is interesting only from the facade. In the game it essentially just becomes "far seer (earth) counters fire lord (fire)" rather than earth counters fire. Stat switching would be practically worthless due to ability typing, too. The fact that the map has 4 corner bases also seems arbitrary with respect to the game design (what does that have to do with element countering? nothing)

Also, you mentioned that it "creates a web of dependencies" but I don't think that's true. It seems that in game it would hardly make a difference on the outcome of a team fight. There's something positive to be said about elemental typing and having offense/defense counters like this, but it seems that the design faced some fatal flaws and (for a good reason) was never considered further.