It's been a while you haven't played if you think that it's still the case.
Competition has be increasing every season for the past like 4 seasons.
I spent thousands in SPL and it takes me half the season to get out of silver sometimes.
I used to be able to get to gold with low level cards, now you have to have a maxed deck to be able to be competitive in gold because everybody is playing maxed decks.
Decks might not be maxed in silver but rewards are so low that doesn't even makes sense to punish players that don't have a great silver deck. It's a tax on a tax.
We're not even talking about rewards in bronze.
Sincerely, do be able to make that game any profitable (with still a bit of luck) is to play in diamonds at least.