The problem with Elo hell is not that you can't climb out of it by superior skill, but there is a steep bell curve with regards to how much skill is required to succeed - the lower elo you are, the higher your skill difference has to be to have a chance of climbing. That's what makes it feel like hell, because just being better on average than the people in your bracket (in terms of decision making, game knowledge, execution skill) is no guarantee that you can translate that into a win UNLESS your skill differential reaches a certain threshold where you can offset the constant failures of your low elo teammates.
I've seen many high elo players say it's harder to get silver to gold than it is to get from platinum to diamond.
The reason: Because your team mates are so bad in bronze and silver that you have no reliable benchmark. It's not good enough to just be 20% better than anyone else in your game, because there's only so much one person can do with a 20% advantage when their entire team is completely failing at their job and their lane. 20% margin of skill may give you victory if your teammates are going even with their lane partners, but it's not enough to save you if even one of your teammates is feeding their lane relentlessly.
So the net effective is that you have to actually be 100% better than anyone else in your game, before you can expect to be able to reliably climb.
As you get to higher skill levels, things become more reliable, so you no longer need to be 100% better than everyone else around you in order to go from one rank to another. It might take you longer, but the climb is more reliable if you put in the time. You begin to be able to leverage smaller margins of superior skill to achieve reliable gains over time, because your teammates are more consistent in their performance. You can spend more time thinking about what you need to do, instead of thinking about how you are going to bail out your team when every lane is throwing the game and feeding before the 10 minute mark.
The same is not true of bronze/silver. You cannot steadily climb with moderate superiority in skill margins. You can only climb if you learn how to carry so hard that you blow out the skill margin of those you are in game with. High elo players can do this, but they can also tell that they have to work harder to carry low elo games sometimes than they do high elo games.
High elo players have said silver is the worst, and I believe the reason is because: Players have more knowledge and skill than a bronze so they are more difficult to crush, but their consistency is about as bad a bronze so they are unreliable teammates, so you still have to be 100% to carry a game - but because their individual skill level is more competent, 100% better at silver is exponentially higher than 100% better at bronze. It's not a linear increase, but an exponential one. Someone in master or high diamond can certainly do it, but it becomes excessively frustrating for players who actually do perform at a low gold level, but can't get past the silver hump because they haven't reached the threshold of skill multiplication necessary to reliably offset the failures of silver teammates.
I personally have noticed that I can be in a game full of gold players and have no trouble performing well and winning. But I actually find I struggle more in a game of silvers because the frustration level is higher - I'm expected to be able to not just do my job well, but expected to so overwhelmingly dominate my role that I can actually do the work of three players on my team, offsetting all the failures my team is experiencing.
Silver players don't know how to play when they are behind. They don't know how to get carried. They don't know how to avoid bad fights and wait for good ones. This means one bad member on your silver team can ruin the entire game, unless you pick a champion that allows you to carry strong enough to be at least as good as 2 players (ie. 100% better than anyone else at your level).
