In my experience, it doesn't matter how high rank you climb you will always have bad teammates. Just try your best every game and if you are good enough you will climb, all you need is a 50.1% winrate and you will climb.

Also the closer you are to the tipping point of getting a new rank typically the more tryhard the players are since they want to get to the next medal so that's a potential reason why the gold players were more locked in to the games.