I personally think Classic League is going to be awesome. That being said the WoW community has been having their own private servers for a long time and it's not that big of a deal to the bottom line of the IP holder company (also developing them is a legal grassroots effort, hosting them however...)
If anyone is interested in learning more about Old League from a server programming, reverse engineering, networking, scripting, etc. there are many ways to get started and to run your own server locally with >100 champions fully working. There are no hosted servers nor I will advertise any if there were, but you can run these yourself and play with some bots if, say, you want to play with Old Galio or whatever.
You can get started by just googling around a bit, but this website by a 4chan anon is a good directory: https://riotzed.lol/
The 4.17 client has been 90% decompiled and they plan of creating a fork for modern systems, which would allow a truly Classic client to exist (the behaviors and scripts are fully moddable due to the client being mostly data-driven, so it being 4.17 isn't really as important as you'd think). There are also efforts being done with the 1.0.0.126 (end of season 2) version.
Also Twisted Treeline, Dominion, Original Doom bots and a ton of other stuff does work right now. There are also modded maps and gamemodes like Magma Chamber (recreated in Minecraft and imported as a league map lmao)
Hopefully the mods don't instantly delete this post, I genuinely think there's nothing rule-breaking about this apart from Riot maybe not liking that their community does Reverse Engineering stuff (like with Nintendo and other games).
A couple multimedia thingies:
Beta Lee Sin (Blind Monk) running locally
Original Galio reimplemented and working fully