I think this is the case because the west isn't used to fighting an enemy that can match their might.

Think Iraq. Why bother with a narrative? There is a certainty of victory, no damage will come to the west, and iraqi media sure as hell isn't reaching our audiences. So just make up an excuse, invade, and let people forget it until the next current thing.

But russia? It can fight back, it has political and economic leverage, it forces europe to suffer economically, it can inflict losses and shatter the image of nato equipment being unbeatable.

So the media has to scramble to find reasons why we should keep fighting the russians, because our collective subconscious knows that fighting russia is a bad idea in general. The result of this scrambling is a lot of contrasting narratives that keep contradicting each other. Specially because russia itself has the power to counter western narratives and highlight the falsehoods.

Remember Soledar for example? "the situation is difficult but we are holding" until russians started posting selfies from inside the town and it became clear that the UAF had been routed from there days ago.

Or also when they kept claiming that reddit truesim that "attackers suffer 7 times more casualties" during the battle of Bakhmut an excuse to support the "we are grinding them down by losing" narrative. Now ukraine is attacking and people are asking "wait a second, we were told attackers take 7 times more losses, how is ukraine affording this?"

In short, much like they are not used to fighting competent enemies on the ground, they are not used to fighting competent enemies in the media/internet arena. The result is a clusterfuck of lies covered by other lies as soon as they get found out.