It’s the cheaters fighting against other cheaters as they unintentionally set a standard of “good” ... Over 5 years these hacked performances have become so saturated it has grown a player base incapable of distinguishing a hack free game.
This. Siege is perceived as "hard" not necessarily because it's player base is super excellent ... but because the game is so broken. The cheating was always a problem, but in 2019 the cheating skyrocketed to unprecedented levels to the point where every match is compromised. This artificially creates the PERCEPTION that Siege is a 'high skill' game ... when in actuality the difficulty is a direct result of hacking, scripting, cheating, and abuse.

Decent, honest, "normal" players are being crowded out by this problem ... which is only compounded by the fact that Ubisoft can't do a proper matchmaking system to save their life and thinks it's OK to match brand new players against Diamond 1 Ranked Smurfs.

That's not the game being 'hard'. That's not the Siege player base being "good". That's Ubisoft being incompetent.