You stumbled on the reason in your post. Apex has two main lobbies: tutorial and main. Tutorial only match makes new accounts with under 100 kills to their name together. This is to allow players to learn against similarly naive players. It also serves to give the algorithms a chance to gauge your performance relative to the actual player base.
Your point about playing high-level players misses a couple things, however.
1: High level does not equate to high skill. Hitting level 500 can easily come from simply surviving in matches. Such players often are not the best when it comes to actual combat.
2: Many badges were able to be earned through glitches and unintended means during the games first few months (I.e. ShadowFall, Dashboarding, etc.)
3: Matchmaking is based upon performance averaging. You will always be matched with a balance of players based upon your performance in a 24hr period. If you stomp your first match of the session or just came out of tutorial lobbies with high stats, the game will start you in the ‘big leagues’.
Part of the intent behind this is to provide chances for players to grow in skill, by putting them in higher stakes matches, and providing more challenging foes.
4: Survivorship bias is kinda at play here. In any given match, the team who kills you either had better luck or greater skill. Often, these teams are fresh off the remains of other teams who are around the same skill as you. Because a few teams naturally perform better together, they rapidly annihilate the lower-skill teams. This is amplified by the player-base’s tendency to hit-drop to only a few POIs.
5: Your good is often someone else’s meh level. A team of skilled players on a bad streak may end up in lower lobbies. Pair this with a winning streak on your half, and you could end up face to face.
6: Active players. There are only so many players online at a time on any data center. Apex tries to match make similar skills the best it can, but it only goes so far. At some point, it is designed to forgo that by degrees in order to fill matches. This results in mid-tier players being sucked into higher matches so as to fill out the 60.
