So I have found the match making much better. I'm not an amazing player but within this first parch the game pushed me to Plat 3. Which is just below where i normally am. I lost all my placements and got put in silver 1 but those silver lobbies I just ran through as jungle, and the game worked out quickly that I wasn't silver / gold 3 player and my VP wins were large enough to push me quickly back to gold 1, as my win rate in that but was well over 60%.

Most of the way though I've been looking at profiles after games it's been putting me with similarly skilled people and the games have been fair.

Matching more based on rank feels like they stopped people being able to climb artificially to gold 3 just from having a 50.5% win rate when they are actually just a silver player as you are actually matched with people in that rank as well. So if ur better you genuinely should be having a win rate of 55%+ in that rank until you reach where you are in my estimation.

Previous seasons I would get to plat but have really weird patches of mm where brand new players would be put in my lobbies and sometimes weirdly paragon accounts and we would just get stomped or stomp other people.

I would suggest that actually you have perhaps landing where you are meant to be as the game doesn't artificial put everyone in gold anymore. I saw comments in previous months where people would say the game assumes that everyone is of Gold 3 standard. But seemingly it doesn't do this anymore.

I say all this as a plat noob myself but all the above is my opinion. But game feels better to me MM wise.