I came to a realization on rankings

Lower ELO rankings (<Gold) are actually much less accurate than higher because they often have new players or people with few games. Since you don't instantly get placed into Plat, one has to climb to get there and play quite a few games.

Here's an example, I had a level 30 Garen on my team in a Silver 1 ELO game. The guy had like 9 games and his best champ was Ashe with a 67% winrate but 5/14/3 KDA. Every champion he played had horrible KDAs but because of the small sample, he was playing with us. He was completely clueless and went 1/11/2 even though we won. Here's the thing though, this doesn't just affect him. This affects every lower ELO player since they might have some random "fresh" ranked players who can drag you down to the point of making a game unwinnable. These "fresh" accounts don't have a chance to ruin Plat+ games though because they'd never make it that far.

I'm not saying there's an ELO hell. It's definitely about your skill level most of all but there is HIGHER VARIANCE regarding the teams on each side due to an influx of new players finding their way into them. Thus, if you get really unlucky matchmaking, it may take longer to get out of low ELO than a similar skill disparity in higher ELO. Although, to be honest, with autofill, the variance is HUGE anyway. Having a random mid main with the highest rank on the team autofilled as support etc. tends to quickly go down hill.