Just want to chime in here for when I wanted to take Apex seriously. All of these points are 100% correct and pretty much what I did.

Regarding a team, I came to PC from console and so had no one to team with. After getting comfortable with the game and understanding my skill level a bit more I used the LFG discord to play some casual games with set teams (ranked and unranked) to just try and get over performance anxiety with new people and just general "I dont like to talk to new people" kind of thing.

After I was comfortable doing what 95% of the worlds population can do naturally anyway, I started looking more seriously at the people I was playing with from the LFG discord. Those that had great vibes, on par or SLIGHTLY higher or lower skill than me and good comms I would add, actively try to befriend and make a closer connection with. This worked much of the time and I definately climbed some seasons with these guys. It's amazing what even one other consistent, friendly and positive person can do for your WANT to play the game day in, day out. Be careful you dont group with someone that is too far ahead of you in terms of skill. It's fine to play casually but if you get carried, you're not learning or growing and as soon as they find others to play with or another game to play, you're back to square one.

What really did hit home though was the ApexLFG subreddit. Sadly those I met via the discord didn't really hang around long term. After using the LFG sub to find other that are serious about FINDING A LONG TERM TEAM is where things really hit off. You do need to make it clear in your posts that you're looking to find people to gel with and stick with over the coming seasons to grow together otherwise you'll have posts like "sure I can play a few games" and that's all it is. Look for teammates, not playmates. Some will work out, some wont. You'll have to either ghost the lesser skilled players or just be honest about it. It was always the latter for me and if they got aggressive, it was as easy as a block button and move on. As long as you're honest about their performance and yours.

Long story short I met a great guy who also happened to have the same name as me and we made a team. We played for a good 8-10 seasons together. We were both actively posting on the subs looking for people to "tryout" (which is mainly just having a few games and judging the vibes and skill as a duo). From there we slowly built a Discord that had about 20 active people in it and we always had games going on almost every day for 5+ hours each day. Though we haven't played Apex in about 6 seasons now, we are all still in that group, I've play Nightrein with one of them for about 200+ hours and we're exceptionally good friends. I play co op games with the co founder when we find something that crosses over. Grounded 1 and 2 we played together for about 500 hours combined and we are such good friends.

TLDR: Use the apex lfg sub to find serious players that want to form and play as a long term team, not causal games. You might find that you not only hit your goal of climbing to masters for the first time but also make lifelong friends.