SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed. Random matchmaking gives them chance to win.
But SBMM means having sweaty games all the time.
I do prefer SBMM but I’ve seen people upset about it
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)