Seriously, how do people die this much?

Because silver is not a particularly high rank, so maintaining it is pretty easy even if you're sub-par at the game.

Being carried ofc.

Joking aside though, deaths dont mean 2 shits, its wether you win or lose. An 0/11 malphite is much better to have then a 15/0 poppy if the malphite actually shows up to help, so thats probably how they maintain silver with such low KDA

Or maybe perhaps those people just had a really bad game?

2 things:

1. Silver is not good.
2. People pass 10 deaths per game in every elo.

Do math... if you lost then you will be more killed...

If you win more then less death you have.

That's fate of below 50% winrate.

new players are automatically placed in silver afaik. So its a new person that just reached lvl 30 or whatever the lvl requirement for ranked is now, and immediately hopped in.

People in silver are perfectly adept at playing well when they're ahead or have a champion-based advantage, but their defensive skills are sub-par, this includes map awareness and using their abilities defensively. There's also a bias towards 'feast or famine' champions: going 20/2 one game, and 2/20 the next, (looking at you, yasuo)

I generally have good games with pretty good KDA's and kill participation; however sometimes I legit fumble to the point that I perform like an actual B5.

Probably once every 1-2 months or so I'll straight up go 0/16/3 usually because I made a major mistake early on and couldn't recover from it.

Thats the average for Silver haha!

Sometimes you see someone goes 0/5 in 10 minutes for example... that's basically a minute and a half per death. HOW?!?