Boys we ruined the game we love!

First of all i confess myself guilty of the crime I accuse. When i started my DE ranked journey, I played only my absolute A Game online. I commited to one/two startegies/civs and came to an elo of ~ 1300. After a few month I created a smurf Account to practice other civs/strats not only against the AI (which was too weak). In the first 10 Games in Single/Multiplayer I crushed a lot of Noobs and did't think much about it.

Since a few weeks I recognized that nearly half the players i oppose with my ~1100 Elo Smurf are Smurfs also. Most confess it openly when asked, some tell stories like "I play unranked mostly".

A few days ago for the first time I saw the "too many players on this Server" Error and after 5 minutes with Google I learned, that we lost half our Playerbase in the last months and obviously the Servers were trimmed down.

Refelecting on how it must be to start aoe2 nowadays or play at a real Elo <1200, I think that can't surprise us. I fear at least most top 5000 Players have one or more smurfs, and obviously these are the ones playing the most. So if you are 1050 - 1200 after nearly every second game you have no chance to understand how you could loose that badly, because your opponent played hundreds of games more against skillfuller opponents in reality (with all his accounts). Last week even Tatoh smurfed me with a LeL Account. For me it was fun to get crushed by a Legend but with that beheviour as best practice we won't attract more people to the game we love. And slowly Microsoft/Esport Teams/Sponsors will loose interest in Aoe and we will face what happened in Gaming Zone days again.

I deerly hope the voobly boys are still around to save our asses, when we have only 3000 Players left, AoE4 flops and Servers get shut down again.

Is this a common Problem to all competetive RTS with an elo system (in which you can only win significantly more than 50% of your Games by smurfing) or does this happen due to AoE2's complexity, bad AI or community behaviour?

Maybe I'm wrong and in lockdown winter all people will flock to their keybords/Games again and we will see many more players but i honestly doubt it. I don't have a Solution to this Problem but are really sad atm, cause I fear the boom of our beloved Game could have been a fleeting star.