You'd get the one guy on your server who was just in another league compared to everyone else, and it was so satisfying to get the kill on him. And sometimes, it would be you pubstomping.
Then again, back then I don't think people cared as much about winning and losing.
And yet it had a healthy, if unhyped, competitive scene long before that.
PvP involves sandbagging and a variety of fragile gimmick strategies. (Oh, and cheating. For slow enough turn-based games, players can cheat with a separate physical device, which can't be detected.)
The system can't measure skill level accurately against a player base that's actively antagonistic to such measurement, so of course it can't match players well on that basis.
Even abstract games of perfect information, like chess and Go, have this problem online.
But what if you're a bottom 10% player? How non-sweaty is non-SBMM then? Is it not-sweaty to get absolutely demolished all the time even at your best?
Games and leagues where you're expected to try hard are entirely different. I'd say custom tiered PUG queues are much better than common huge pools, this way top players can filter people they're training and playing with. In the end I think I rather agree with the grandparent than not, communities typically feel more lively and diverse than blind ladders.
That's just a different way of saying some people like to play games where their opponent has no chance. So your "relaxation" comes entirely at the expense of others.
Single player campaigns are a better way to accomplish this because then you can do whatever you want as far as difficulty goes.
You can see some attempts to address this with having casual 'unranked' and competitive ranked matchmaking modes, but this still runs into whether casual means 'just fuck around and not even try to play the objective' or 'play the game as a team but not be quite so focused on winning at any cost'.
People who complain about SBMM it because they just want to pubstomp are mostly just whining and want their fun at the expense of 1-11 other players, though. (I recall a conversation on here where someone was saying that the optimum winrate for chess to keep someone engaged is about 80% and did not seem to understand that there was no way to have a group of people playing chess against each other with an average 80% winrate each)