@BPoff71 As a gold player, you should see some plat players when you're gold 1 or 2, but not as much when you're gold 3 or gold 4. As for the diamond players, you're not suppose to see them.
The matchmaking is indeed awful, and part of the problem is that there's cheaters and smurfs in every lobby, so its hard to balance it out. Also, not to mention that a lot of the players have stopped playing Apex due to many different reasons, and that leads there to being less players in general, leaving us mainly with the sweats who keep smurfing, and cheaters.