It has been like that forever.
From my experience - sweaty player, joined Apex, went straight to P3 back in season 8? and then since season 9 been D4-D1 level every season I grinded.
What I saw was and still is:
- Below Plat = casuals / total newbs to FPS games that basically are on different scale bad: mechanically, tactically, decision making, game reading etc. or combo of multiple
- Plat = usually mechanically decent but game sense bad or vice versa
- Diamond = people who are above average / good in both mechanics and decision making + part of people who 3stack not soloq with just average team (3 average players in a stack will still beat 1 good with 2 newbs soloqing in Apex pretty much 8 out of 10 times)
- Masters = good 3stacks, part hackers, really good legit players (haven't seen many over 15k hours in game that can soloq to Masters legit way)
- Preds = 100% hackers no questions asked. Maybe some low level might be like pro level 3stack that legit grinds 14h day and eventually end up on bottom part of the list, but more often than not it's just hacker fest, always been always will be
And yes for legit soloq player D4 has been basically the end of the game, why many also in Apex legends LFG openly talk about smurfing, some give up even after Plat because the wall you hit at D4 is just crazy. Here you are getting 5KP ON AVERAGE in plat lobbies, and here you are finishing always 15-20th in Diamond 4. These day, after matchmaking tweak to put Plats and Golds into Pred lobbies issue has become even worse. There is no middle ground because there is no hackers that play with say just 20% aimbot or use wallhack just like every other game. No. You go straight from playing vs decent mechanically and game sense good player to games where you need to beat computer at shooting and basically can't outsmart anyone because they just clearly see where you are at any given moment in the game = mission impossible.
Your best bet in Diamond4+ lobbies always were just 3:
- find that odd lower level squad of similar soloqing people like you and win that 50/50 fight
- 3rd party with amazing timing hackers that fight eachother and clean them up because they can't shot mroe than one person at a time with aimbot nor focus on say 9 people with wallhack
- run into one of those dumb hackers that have software but are so bad at the game legit way that even then they just run and gun without thinking and shoot only what they see 10m in front of them
But I can say it seems that newer generation of FPS players are just rotten, tiktok has taken over their brain, they all about clowning and hacking vs legit grinding and fair play. As soon as a kid loses a game -> first thought is to hack not say go invest time in vod review or aim training (most even do not know what it means) / training is for losers. So this trend unfortunately is everywhere - Apex, Valorant, CS, COD, Fortnite etc. Apex is just that one cool game that could have been THE ONE but isn't.