In the news

This.
Clegg, Alexander et al took one for the team.

I don't disagree but surely some flack has to be taken for enabling a Tory government to get into power in the first place. Surely the bigger hit they could have taken for 'the team' would have been not to jump at the first chance to be part of a majority government.

They could have formed a minority government with Labour or even a majority with help of the SNP etc. That decision ultimately led to the shit show we're in now...

I'm not saying the world we would be a totally awesome place now had we had a LabLib coalition instead but it's very unlikely brexit would have happened.

No. The ConDem 'government' was significantly more rightwing than a single-party Tory 'government' would have been. Osborne pushed the cuts much further than the Tories thought they could have got away with on their own. Never mind the odd policy that the Lib Dems throttled (not to mention those where they broke election promises)--the cuts agenda was always flexible to enable the Tories to get their way regardless. Clegg and co. were merely the lightning conductor that deflected public anger, which otherwise would have hit the Tories full-on. As it was, protesters exhausted themselves in campaigning against individual aspects of the cuts, always divided and never effective. This was significantly helped by the Lib Dems' presence in government.

They Lib Dems entered the 'coalition' from a position of weakness that the Tories ruthlessly exploited and played them with. Remember Cleggmania? 70 seats? Winning proportional representation? They were so unwilling to admit that they weren't quite as great as the polls predicted and so determined to be kingmakers that they threw caution to the wind, got a deal so rotten (remember the AV 'referendum'?) that Theresa May could give them a masterclass in negotiating, and enabled the worst 'government' in living memory. Clegg was exposed right from the start as the incompetent political minnow he is. Just look at what he told afterwards about his time in government--any sensible person would have quit at the first whiff of this: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/02/nick-clegg-george-osborne-cut-welfare-poorest-boost-tory-popularity

It's not 'what-iffery' to say that without the Lib Dems' nonsensical move, David Cameron wouldn't have been Prime Minister and George Osborne wouldn't have been Chancellor of the Exchequer. They couldn't believe their luck how naïve and hapless the Lib Dems were.

This was undoubtedly partly because coalition governments are rare in a first-past-the-post system. Had the Lib Dems done their research (no doubt they'd say they had), they would have known that the junior partner in a coalition typically gets much more than what is proportional to their share of seats. The junior partner has leverage it can use and there's no need at all to roll over like the Lib Dems did. Cameron and Osborne couldn't even have done a Theresa May-DUP-style deal, as they were too far short of a majority.

One outcome of all this, of course, was that Clegg 'led' the Lib Dems to a near-wipeout at the next election, going from 57 to 8 seats.

Also, I've often wondered if that AV referendum (which, from their perspective, was successful in achieving its aim) didn't provide a kind of blueprint for Cameron and Osborne in trying to kill the 'Brexit' agenda. That worked out well, too.