Unreliable/sporadic latency is the bigger problem, and is the cause of warping.
It tends to occur on connections with high hop counts, and that travel over highly congested/over subscribed links.
It can of course be artificially induced, though I doubt anyone would go to the trouble of doing it for competitive advantage.
It's kind of ironic that my 1st thought upon reading the title was "what a daft idea".
However I then thought back to my days of playing Quake 2 & 3 over a 56k modem, and the stark difference between LPBs (40-100ms) and HPBs.(150-250ms).
Back then a "fair" match-up was one between players of equal ping; nobody had even considered matching equally skilled players together.
For good reason too; if you stop and think about it, matchmaking by skill is an absurd idea, as all things being equal, such match-ups can only be decided by luck.
Of course game design that puts 'luck' front & foremost is EA's modus operandi, so it's no wonder it's found its way into Apex.
Next feature; Premium Currency to bypass SBMM.
"Pay to have worse opponents" isn't "Pay to Win"..... righhhht? 👿