People will yell about minmaxing in all competitive team-based games at skill levels far below where any of it matters (eg proper map awareness alone will probably shoot you into the top-90% of most competitive games, even with poor skill/choice in other aspects).

That has less to do with anything the game/community has specifically done and more to do with people always looking for “easy” answers to the problems they see — blame the loss on balance, on team members, on lack of minmaxing, on luck, on people not doing their jobs, etc.

And they yell those answers at you because you’re playing a team game where they depend on your success for their success.

In the end, you need a thick skin to play effectively and actually get better, to pierce through the noise and rabble

Meta games like those you're referring to are not avoidable though, it's practically a social construct built on top of the game itself. Happens in just about any highly competitive field because of free "market" ideas.

Sure but the fact that it exists and is inevitable has nothing to do with the yelling at each other about it — especially at lower levels of play where it’s generally safe to say that anyone who thinks they’ve identified the meta has done so poorly, and likely understands none of the real trade offs (if they understood it well, they’d likely be at higher levels).

And more importantly, at lower levels of play the meta is generally far less important than fundamental mechanics in terms of actually winning consistently.

It's not true, butit was happening far before role queue. Even before OWL became a thing, people from all the way down in low silver were trying to emulate the top streamers and piggy back on thier methods. GOATS and pro league is when this really took off though. I remember ever other lobby in ranked was people trying to pull off GOATS, but no one had near the skill to coordinate properly, or even the game sense to understand what role they were supposed to fill.

It’s a lot more rare now in my experience. Role queue locks you into at least 2-2-2, and open queue everyone kinda knows you’re getting 4 or 5 DPS anyways. Even in role queue off meta picks you might get a try hard annoyed every once in a while, but generally isn’t so bad.