Kinda... Average player skill definitely goes up over the life of a game as the pool of players dwindles, and the average FG player has probably improved a lot since 2008. But also I think ranking/matchmaking is not terribly meaningful at a lower level since your knowledge of the game mechanics and your opponent's character is probably more important than your opponent's skill. You shouldn't get stressed about winning/losing to someone of a particular rank, etc. It's better to focus on improving yourself whether you win or lose. That should be fun too.
Moreso than worrying about combos, getting started in an FG is a lot about identifying and solving problems. You've already identified one problem well - you keep getting hit by meaties. You've also basically identified the solutions to the problem in SF - either block, wakeup reversal, or mixup your ground techs (quickrise/roll back/nothing). Now you gotta figure out why that's not working - maybe you're getting crossed up when blocking, maybe your uppercut doesn't have the invulnerability you thought it did (I think some SFV characters don't have full invuln on their meterless DPs), maybe you're timing the DP wrong (it will say "reversal" if you're doing it right. I think SFV has a lot of input leniency so you can do the input before you are actually standing), maybe you don't know the different wakeup timing options. So that's kind of the cycle of improving in fighting games, play, identify problems, research/practice a solution, play again - it shouldn't be grinding a 1F link combo for hours in training mode, but rather spending 5 minutes making the dummy do the move giving you trouble and experimenting with options. It's still hard to improve and every FG has a ton of stuff to learn, but not so time consuming or grindy if you play/practice in short cycles or split up your time.
I liked this video relevant to that, you might be interested:
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