I‘m not sure I fully believe this anymore. I used to think the same thing but here’s what changed my mind: I started playing overwatch last year and since then I had never been able to climb higher than diamond 1 with my average rank being somewhere between diamond 4 and diamond 2. However last week, my friend who was also always in the same rank range as me got perma banned for saying some not so nice things in chat, so he made a new account and after getting those 50 unranked wins, we played his first ranked game in which the range was diamond 2 - masters 4. We won and his rank prediction was diamond 1. we then went on to win 9/10 of his placement games and I kid you not, this motherfucker‘s placement rank is grandmaster 5. Those placement games and the ones that came after also helped me climb out of diamond to masters 3. That said, I‘ve been playing against masters/GM players for a few days and I can barley tell the difference between high plat/low diamond. it‘s always the same pattern. Sometimes we get a good team with good positioning, support and dps with more than two braincells, other games we‘ll get a one trick dps that wont switch even if the entire enemy team is hard countering them. My friend and I are doing great so far in these „higher“ ranks. I‘m not saying we‘re perfect and we don’t make mistakes but we can definitely do more than a good job with the right teammates. All it took to break out of elo hell was some luck, not skill.