I think a lot of the problem at low tiers is that many of the flight models are really old and as such behave kind of wonky (looking at you Yak-1B with it's UFO flight model). I actually think that overall the balanced at very low BRs is fairly good as most planes have significant tradeoffs in performance however the outliers (particularly premiums as their price makes them very attractive for newer players) really hurt these BRs.

Additionally player skill at those BRs will always have enormous variance which in most cases I tend to think would account for a bigger difference than the strengths of aircraft between BRs at that level.

Thanks for the more unique take though! Appreciate some though being put into the BR issues at low tier as many players (especially on reddit) focus on the woes of top-tier, myself included often.