For seasons now Apex has this thing where pretty much every game get stuck for 1-2 min in player loading phase and eventually at least 1 person is missing from the lobby...idk why but it has been like that for seasons now.
Overall just in case you did not know - if you do not get a player in your team (spot is blank !!!not player is there just shown with red arrows as disconnected!!!) you can leave the game without a penalty as soon as you get into ship animation, loss forgiveness will be applied and you will just waste those 2-3 min of loading + legend selection screen time.
I basically never play out such games giving people free kills = going 2v3 into ranked games. But it happens plenty often to me as well like one in 5 games or there about, especially in evenings when player count is much lower.