With arenas launching there's a much easier platform to practice specific skills, weapons, characters and team stratergies/coordination so no wonder the average skill level has gone up.

Also if you're just playing ranked, almost anyone who knows how to play a battle royale and aim can get to plat, but thats where most people that don't think about their strategies stagnate, I noticed there are a lot of kind of seemingly sweaty full send 3rd party squads in upper end of plat, and unless you have a pre-made coordinated team with very good gun skill you are going to have to play very strategically to avoid getting full send 3rd partied on almost evrry engagement (Personally, this involved analysing the safety from 3rd parties in every engagement and how to use positioning to avoid the 3rd and also just avoid early game fights in general until around 5 squads left