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Over the last couple of years (and really much before that) both GW narratives and Black library books have done a relatively good job in regards to 40ks narrative. However, one area of annoyance is making the entire lore more stale. That is the excessive amounts of pyrrhic imperial victories that seem to occur at a stories end. Most Black Library books and many narratives have imperials winning by just the slimmest of margins. Over and over again. I don’t want to spoil exactly what books and stories end with Pyrrhic imperial victories, but I will tell you it’s a “lot.” Other than a certain fall of cadia, there hasn’t been a major imperial loss for quite some time .

The problem with this is 2 fold. First, it makes things too predictable. I am less excited to read the upcoming dark imperial book because I worried it will just be another pyrrhic imperial victory. I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised, but that doesn’t seem to be likely. The 2nd problem is that a bunch of small imperial victories Make the tone of the setting less grim dark. Yes the barely win, but they always seem to barely win. That makes the series seem less bleak.

There's only so long you can be TOLD the imperium is barely holding on while being SHOWN only the engagements where they win before 'things are real dark and grim you guys' starts to be unbelievable.

...but let's be real it's been like this for a long time.

Eh, it's really just a returning to the status quo with a slight twist anyway. Now that the Imperium has faced a completely unnecessary existential crisis GW needs to bring it back to the point that all the factions continue to exist in the setting, largely as it did before said "existential crisis" used only as a poor excuse to anchor the narrative on a handful of key players; also to sell bigger and fancier models.

The imperium hardly made much headway against the big factions before the Fall of Cadia, it had been under siege pretty much all the time. Several major events on the Imperium's timeline that really affected the faction fundamentally before War of the Beast, except for the Black Crusades, were civil wars. Sounds to me it's business as usual, same as it ever was, with the exception of the blight that is the Gurlimarines.

My memory could be off, but I vaguely remember there being more stalemates in previous codices. The imperium thwarted the Ork invasion on Armageddon but couldn't dislodge the orks from the planet. The Tyranids couldn't be stopped but the Imerpium managed to redirect them towards Ork territory. The Imperium pushed the Tau back across the Damocles Gulf but couldn't call upon enough resources for a full counter-invasion. The eye of terror was constantly spewing out chaos invasions but the Cadian Gate stemmed the flow so it was barely manageable.

I'm a bit behind on the most current lore, but previous editions had this feeling that everyone was fighting on multiple fronts made up of these endless wars. Everyone fighting but no one winning might have been getting a little stale, but it was useful for inserting your own narratives. It was felt a little more fair since no one was winning or losing.

They really need to have some outright losses (and hopefully character deaths) for the Imperium, unless they want to go full derp. At a certain point it's too much.

Why so many Pyrrhic victories?
Because otherwise the franchise would collapse: the Imperium need to win the wars, to stay alive, but it can't have overwhelming victories, because it has to be always on the edge of a precipice. Change this status quo means change the focus of the franchise, giving to it a precise direction: the direction of the final victory or the final defeat.

The problem is they've decided that in order to make a story interesting, it needs to be significant on the galactic scale.

I remember the old Imperial Armour books, like Taros Campaign or Anphelion Project, where all that was at stake was some random back-water system.
It allowed the writers total narrative freedom to write a really interesting story where you really didn't know who would win.

But now? Every book has to have the galaxy at stake. Girlyman vs Mouldyman, for the stake of the very galaxy itself! ooo dramatic!
But it paints them in to a corner, because at those stakes the bad guys can't win. So in order to make a dramatic fight it has to be a phyric victory.
Then they do with the next book. And the next book. And the next book.