I don't know how matchmaking works and at this point I'm too afraid to ask

I'm not going to pretend to know all the ins and outs of mmr and matchmaking but I have (and I'm sure you have to) seen a lot of poor matchmaking and then looked at third party sites like op.gg and seen that people were incredibly far apart. For example, I had a silver 4 mf play against a gold 4 lucian and the mf went 0/6. There are other variables that come into play but I would rather see stricter matchmaking especially in lower elos. From what I understand ranking does not really gauge where a person is at skillwise. They have a hidden mmr that is easy to guess when one looks at the average elo of their teammates/opponents. I would rather people play against their ranks regardless of what their mmr is and move up and down the ladder accordingly.