If you have any choices to make in a game, one will inevitably be better than the others, it’s impossible to perfectly balance anything without removing player choice. As a result, a meta will always form in every game ever. From Street Fighter, to Pokemon, to Counter-Strike, to League of Legends, to Smash Bros, to Fortnite, they all have a meta.

If you don’t want to use the meta, that’s up to you, but complaining that other people are doing better than you when you knowingly made suboptimal decisions is just a bit silly to me. They are being rewarded for their better decision-making, as they should be.