The Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League found a lot of success with a roster of mostly second or third-string characters. But that seemed tied to a particular tone, and as the books drifted away from that in the '90s, they were less successful. Do people really buy Booster Gold and Blue Beetle as part of "Extreme" Justice?
So Grant Morrison took the concept back to basics. Seven character roster, at least to start, composed of the icons, the big names. Even if the Flash and Green Lantern weren't the same ones that beat Starro with the aid of Snapper Carr back in the day, they're still the Flash and Green Lantern. The name counts for something.
And then Morrison and series artist Howard Porter went BIG. An entire army of Martians, with J'onn J'onzz powers but none of his compassion, bent on conquest. Heaven invades Earth. Some other stuff I'm forgetting because I didn't actually get around to buying the book until Mark Waid was writing it. More specifically, after Wizard Magazine started foaming at the mouth over Batman having detailed plans to kill - in extremely cruel ways, I mean, making Aquaman afraid of water so he suffocates? Batsy's more than a bit of a sadist - all of his teammates.
Waid didn't go quite as big, seemed to focus more on fracturing the team. Batman's betrayal splits them on whether it was right to vote him off. If you don't trust him, because he's a dick, then yes, obviously. 6th-dimensional creatures make what is essentially a genie who splits the team into the superheroic and civilian identities. It was generally enjoyable, Bryan Hitch drew a lot of it, if that interests you.
Then it was Joe Kelly's turn. His biggest attempt to go big was Obsidian Age, which seemed to run forever, but I guess was basically issues 66 through 76. Aquaman's missing, Atlantis is suddenly above water, the League goes back in time thousands of years to find a Justice League of Ancients waiting, and they die. Meanwhile a Substitute League - that Batman had mapped out as a contingency, naturally - is trying to piece things together in the present.
I remember it having enough forward momentum at the time to carry me through. Plus, Kelly gave Kyle Rayner some big moments, and Kyle was the closest thing to a favorite character I had in JLA. Doug Mahnke was the artist for a lot of Kelly's run, and he could do BIG stuff, but where Hitch's strength seemed to be beautiful widescreen action, Mahnke excelled more at visceral aspects. Violence is sort of clean in Hitch's work, but Mahnke's would have a character with their legs torn off at the knees in uneven stumps. It worked for the story Kelly wanted to tell, with League holding to their codes against enemies from an earlier time that absolutely did not.
Kelly stuck around for another 15 issues after that, some with Mahnke, some not. The two stories I remember were J'onn overcoming his weakness to fire, with disastrous consequences, and Batman and Wonder Woman concluding that no, a relationship probably wouldn't work (as Kelly had been nodding towards that throughout, probably because the Justice League cartoon was doing it).
After that, the book fell into rotating creative teams, which, in retrospect, is when I should have pulled the ripcord. Denny O'Neil and Tan Eng Huat, John Byrne and Chris Claremont, Chuck Austen and Ron Garney. I dropped it at some point during Kurt Busiek and Ron Garney's Crime Syndicate/Earth-2 story where I felt like I didn't understand anything that was happening, and didn't particularly care.
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