Smurfing Ruining End of Ranked Season Because of Rewards

So its the end of the ranked season. I finally made gold after 4 years of playing ranked and I'm looking forward to some good matches towards the end of the season. Little did I know that making gold would make ranked almost unplayable.

I have come across so many obvious smurfs, people going double digit kills with little to no deaths, people linking their smurf names in chat, even adding me at the end of the game to taunt me, just so they can get gold rewards on their smurfs.

Why is this acceptable. Actually, why is smurfing acceptable at all? When leveling up in this game is intended to show how experienced you are at the game, why do we allow players to disingenuously game the system? I can understand normal games but at some point ranked needs to be designed to disallow this kind of behavior because it ruins the integrity and point of the game mode.

Are we really claiming there is no way to solve this issue? When I don't even want to play ranked just to avoid smurfs something is very very wrong. The fact that I could potentially lose my gold ranking largely in part because I am playing an increased amount of games against unfair opponents is pretty awful.

Obviously the fact that I went from a gold 4 series to 0 LP is not solely because of smurfing. However, how exactly am I supposed to feel good about playing this game when smurfs are a constant threat? These are players immensely more experienced and more skilled than me and yet a match-making system that is supposed to give me a fair match is pairing them with me. The culprit, ranked rewards, were supposed to encourage meaningful competition, not greed in high skilled players.

Link IPs to accounts, make the client one user compatible, at this point I don;t care. I'm almost wondering if making gold was even worth it this season since its only seemed to cause me nothing but trouble.

Yes I am PKSalt but I have a hell of a good reason. I've played this game for a long time but each year less and less. It seems like Riot is more concerned about banning angry kids than people who are actually ruining the game-play.