I won a game where we were getting slaughtered in botlane

So that must mean that the snowball meta is a lie and we can just hold out and win and winning botlane isn't the primary way to win a game, right?

#WRONG.

The "meta" refers to a dominant strategy. A dominant strategy is the easiest or most reliable way to win a game, in other words the path of least resistance.

This does not make the dominant strategy foolproof. So when you see somebody remarking on the meta and you come up with an instance in which it is not true, you then have to follow up with evidence that it is often not true before saying that it is either false or not problematic.

A well balanced game is one in which the dominant strategy (for people will always find one) is one that does not often stifle the potential for other strategies to work. For instance, were there to be a game in which your team chose no tanks, you would not be optimal by standards of the "meta", but could still reasonably win.

The current meta is one where in the vast majority of scenarios, your best bet is winning botlane and teams that are ahead toward the start of the game very likely stay that way through the rest of the game, and often by very large amounts. This is widely accepted and widely proven.

The fact that I had to explain this fact to somebody who said we could still reasonably come back from a 3/18 game at 15 minutes in is a little irksome, as everyone else on our team wanted to move on, and I do mean everyone.

There are also plenty more people who still believe every game is winnable because Riot said so like a year ago.

Please stop. This meta is not okay and you are not okay. What could be true a year ago is certainly no longer true today. Stop trying to argue against the meta, it exists and it is very unhealthy right now.