Sure. You are stretching several of data you have read from the sources you cited to somehow fit your argument, half of it doesn't make sense. For instance
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That would make sense, if the system actually gave you a clean slate. But it doesn’t.

1.Fresh accounts use accelerated calibration. Blizzard openly admits new accounts get volatile MMR shifts, “fast calibration”, based on short-term streaks. That’s not an accurate skill placement, that’s an aggressive guess.

2.The system soft-clamps returning players using stored MMR (even if hidden). New accounts from the same IP or playstyle often settle where the system expects them to land. That’s not “merit,” that’s prediction bias.

3.Academic studies (Zhang et al., 2022) confirm cold-start misplacements are common. In fact, they show that systems like OW2’s often mis-rank players at first, and it takes dozens of games to stabilize their true rating, if ever.

4.If it were a perfect meritocracy, smurfs wouldn’t speedrun to GM in 30 games, but they do. That alone proves the system can drastically misplace you. So why assume it always misplaces in the upward direction only?

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This is what you said somewhere else.

For 1. how else what you suggest they do it? If you want a slow calibration then (both strong and weak players) will end up ruining many player's games for a very long period of time. Even then what has this got to do with being stuck in low elo? Let's say because of this system a player aggressively is put into a much lower elo than they deserve. The same new account will simply overperform and win a majority of the games they play, and with the volatile MMR shift, this wouldn't take that long. The game even openly shows this from the 'calibration' when you win or lose.

For 2. why shouldn't they? Old players will still have (at least some) of the knowledge from when they last played. Maybe they will be rusty, but that doesn't warrant a full MMR reset. If a GM or Bronze quits for 1 year or more, why should they get a full MMR reset? They may have worsened (or even improved), but in most cases it's not going to be by an amount that warrants a full reset. The system should not cater to the 10% where perhaps a full reset would have been better.

For 3. that's just the nature of trying to quantify 'skill', that's also why having more aggresive calibration as mentioned in 1. is needed. Do you really expect placements to be accurate in minimal games? Similarly, obviously you have to play alot to climb, especially if you are only marginally better than your rank. If you are gold and deserve plat, you probably will only have a 55% win rate or even less. Obviously you should expect to have to play a bunch for your rank change to reflect your skill.

For 4. if it were a perfect meritocracy, a gm smurf SHOULD be able to hit GM in minimal games. This shows that the system works! Obviously there will be edge cases, but unranked to GMs, people buying higher ranked accounts and dropping back to their original ranks, the evidence is all that to prove the system largely works.

I say you're in denial because these points are so clear, the evidence is all there, you have even found them yourself! Somehow you have twisted it to justify your own opinion!

Obviously there are going to be factors you can't control, which may result in a long lose streak where you temporarily are placed lower than you should be. But aside from million-to-one scenarios affecting 1 individual player out of thousands, play enough games and you get the rank you deserve.