I'm going to bring back a dead horse to beat it some more, though, because I didn't become a Squid Savior from the Future by not talking about matchmaking enough.
Going back quite a few years, we speculated a little about how the matchmaker works, and in yesterday's splatfest on team Fun I saw it really really starkly and I think it confirms an assumption we made all those years ago. It appears pretty definitely like the matchmaker tries to bundle skill levels to create what it sees as "equally powered" teams. It often does so by taking a moderately balanced team on one side, by a team made up of one MVP and 3 scrubs on the other team. Many, many, many battles I played in this splatfest was the exact same motif. The opposing team was very good, everyone seemed to be relatively equal skill or at least 3 skilled players and one scrub. And frequently I'd be put on a team with 3 absolute scrubs that superjump to center and die repeatedly (or stay in the corners painting) while I generally tried to hold the fort alone against 3 opponents at a time (with no allies to be seen.) Even when I could hold the fort for a large portion of the match, inevitably I'd get splatted, and after that, it was impossible to regain ground alone against a push of the opposing team. The problem is a combined "power" of a moderately balanced team and and a team of 1 high level player and 3 scrubs sounds on paper to be equal, but in reality, one squid, no matter how skilled, can't consistently hold off an entire enemy team by themselves a full match, and can't make up lost ground once pushed back. Similarly when there were disconnects, they were overwhelmingly players on my own team, in nearly all cases, indicating it's not just pairing me with unskilled players but also players with dodgy connections fairly consistently.
This is a problem that's been with Splatoon from the start, but I think this game is really highlighting how severe a problem is. It's not fun to get constantly steamrolled by 2-3 against one entire matches as the rest of the team is either unfamiliar with play, or not very good, or hampered by shoddy connections. I'm certain it's in their power to fix, I was on Fun against Gear, I'm certain there were enough team Gear people to match good players with good players and scrubs with scrubs. All my losses alone probably account for team Fun losing by such a slight margin, lol. Many, many, many matches I was the only one on my team with a positive k/d, and usually much higher k and much lower d. Our opponents weren't that supremely skilled in most cases, just good average teams, it's just that the teams were total mismatches in skill range, and obviously. I give exception to tri-color, but the most hilarious result was against opponents that were really average to below average, I think I was 12/1 and I had a teammate that was 1/10, another at 2/8 and another at 0/4. IDK how they managed to even find living enemies to be splatted by but they did, over and over. And I never even saw them in the center. They kept trying to storm the enemy bases.
Whatever they do in matchmaking, they really shouldn't be trying to pair together a low skill team with one hero to take on an average team. It never can really work. But it happens it endlessly. Splatoon isn't structured so that one hero can play alone, you need a team.