My account is 20 years old. And has several games with hundreds of hours including a couple of perfect games, not to mention a hundred or more games. Also phone verified. I don't expect everyone to have similar accounts, but it's seldom I'm matched against anything even remotely similar, say 5 year old accounts with similar playtimes in non-F2P games, though many profiles are private, which itself is - I think - also suspicious since virtually everyone leverages aliases on Steam so I can't really imagine a case for this other than obscuration, though I'm certain some people do it for privacy reasons I expect that rationale is rare.
Beyond that I would say there are a lot of suspicious individuals I've been matched against in both premier and comp . Regardless of whether or not they're smurfs it makes MM obnoxious if only because you end up matched against people who rage and ruin 45m-1h of your time by competing illicitly.
The MM algo is also just shit without these considerations lumped on top of it. I regularly play with my friends who rank lower and that draws my rank down so we get matched in low ranks, resulting in violent pubstomping. Of course I play on my only account, so I'm sure I get hackusated a lot, which would ostensibly get my trust factor drug through the mud. I suppose that's a solid incentive for smurfing on its own, especially since the system is opaque.
It's all pretty bad, frankly. Faceit is hardly better, a lot of the community is pretty toxic and obnoxious salty tryhard metabangers that aren't fun to play with.
On an evolutionary level, the purpose of play is to improve your skill in something in a tight, enjoyable feedback loop. Cheating messes with that.
Though your approach is preferable, I do think cheating (or more broadly, not trusting that you can learn how to improve with further play) kneecaps the whole point of playing.
(I'm badly presenting an idea I learned from Jonathan Blow re: how some game design ideas, such as opaque adaptive difficulty like rubberbanding found in racing games, destroys the purpose of playing)
People constantly cry that the other team is hacking and reviewing the demo shows that they almost never are. The reality is they were just better. That seems to be hard for a large portion of the player base to handle. Low ranks and low trust factor are full of obvious hacks because they make an account, get banned and repeat. You don't see the decent hacks until the upper ranks because you need to be good enough at the game to hide it and would just rank up fast through the middle rankd
Point being that a ”subtle hacker” might be subtle to some and obvious to others. So OP, being a newbie with only 6 mo of experience, might suspect someone being subtle about their hacking but they might be very blatant to a more experienced player.
TF2 is an interesting case study because it's a very old game with a very high skill ceiling. I have 2,000 hours now. Players with 4,000 hand my ass to me.
The difference between an aimbot and a sweaty 4,000 hour sniper is close to none. You peak the corner and within 200ms you're dead. It's easy to think they're cheating, then you open up their steam profile and no, they just have even less of a life than me.
They'll even headshot you when you got invisible on spy. Yes, really. They have so much experience their hands have remembered the movement speed and trajectory of spy. So you go invis, and then they can predict where you're going to be and headshot you. Especially so if you go for a health pack or ammo. It's really crazy stuff, but not cheating.
Closet cheaters are cheating in subtle ways, which make it impossible to know if they're really cheating.
It's a constant analysis of "is he cheating or am I bad?", and most of the time, I could not really know. It's a psychologically toxic experience as I cannot focus on the game itself. I was enjoying the game, but that paranoia made things just unbearable.
I suspect china/russia are actively paying people to make effective cheating software, as it's also a lucrative business.
Even a few pro players are cheating. Those online FPS are rotten to the core.
Apparently valve doesn't seem to care that much, because they probably know that there is a big overlap between cheaters and people who trade skins, who are a big source of income.
Too bad!