I know you're basically asking what's the optimal path to getting the highest possible rank, so I'll give a deeper explanation:
This isn't a literal analogy but in the same way you could increase your chances at a CB drop from Twitch streams by marathonning hours and hours of viewtime, it wasn't mandatory and in the long run there were many other, much larger factors at play. So you could grind unranked as if it were ranked to give you a little bump going into ranked placements, but how you perform in your ranked placements (and ranked thereafter, obviously) has a much larger impact.
In general, we as the dev team tell you the important things to do because if everyone just operates in that way, the system works really well and everyone's happy (I mean it!). If people start attempting to game the system, it sometimes backfires or just turns into a messy experience overall.
Take that to this situation: with unranked being the only queue available for...
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