You don't have to be a good player to be good at the game

I would say in earlier seasons (19 and lower) everything you said here would be true and I used to tell people something similar all the time.  However, the people on here that are upset because their kd has dropped (myself included) it is mostly because of the myriad of problems with the game that got increasingly worse since season 20.  I know myself and several others on here used to have a much higher kd and then it dropped to an abysmal decimal point.  Mine is less than a tenth of what it was right now.  I don't care how good a team you have, how good your communication is, you are going to lose right now unless you are an advantage player.  That is the sad truth of the current state of the game.  I only stick around because I loved what this game used to be and I'm still holding out hope they will fix the problems and bring it back to what it once was.  Then, the advice you gave here about kdr not mattering will be true again, but unfortunately, right now, our kdr matters because it proves a very important point.

Yes, people are too hard on themselves. How could they not be? It's the nature of the game. 60 people go in, three come back out. That's a mechanism designed to make you feel like a failure.

But if people can just get out of their own heads, quit listening to bad players who blame everyone but themselves, quit listening to streamers, quit watching algs... and most of all if they could just stop using a handful of tired old metrics to determine their own worth as a player, then the game would be a lot better off and the players would be a lot less frustrated. If you're playing Halo or CoD deathmatch then yes, you ARE your k/d. Period. That's the nature of arena shooters. But in battle royale there are a lot of other measures of both skill and utility, many of which, the most important of which, are not tracked by the game. You have to figure out for yourself what they are and which ones are the most meaningful to you. In my own case, it has to do with particular behaviors that I value, behaviors that often put me at odds with my teammates. So there's a lot of friction to overcome in order to truly believe that I'm a good player who is playing sensibly and responsibly. But I AM a good player. Not a good TEAM player, but a good player nonetheless.

Just know the game. Know yourself. Know how you fit into the whole. And don't apologize to anyone for doing what you think is right. Especially if the stats are falling into place behind you. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is wrong and you have to have the self-knowledge and self-confidence to walk your own path. That's the only reason I can still play this game six years in without having gone completely insane.

And quick aside: the best teammates are not the ones who are best at shooting. They're the ones who are on the mic, have a great attitude, and most of all, who make me laugh. If you're funny I'll follow you into the depths of hell. Where we will get slaughtered. But we'll still laugh the whole way down. That's the best kind of teammate you can have in this game. In any game. In life.