What's the question? That's what a smurf is: hiding his true experience by recreating accounts to matchmake against newbs and streak them for high rank. At least that's how it worked in old coh. At the end of coh1 lifecycle it became ridiculous. Everybody knew there where no new players in that game so it was easy to spot the smurfs. Pretty much every inexperienced player wanting to play Scheldt as axis.
Because of this, level (more game time) can actually be a more fair indicator of skill than actual rank. It is unlikely that somebody with hundereds of hours of gametime is a bad player. But of course, it's pretty fashionable to claim just that on the boards. Both parameters kinda depends. With gametime the question is "how much do you need to play to grasp everything and improve to a certain sticky level?" If you claim to know this game after 50 hours you are simply ignorant, not a genious player. A 100 hour player is most probably a worse player than the 1000 hour player because CoH2 is a deep game that takes loads of time to master. But the 2000 hour player might not be noticably better than the 1000 hour player. Unless he actively strived to get better, analysed key indicators and thought out processes to improve.
Don't feel blue because you lost against somebody with newb stats. Obviously it was not a newb.
I am 50. I have played this game since the early COH days. I don't get any better.
The thing is though, do you want to get better? I don't think it's primarily age that is stopping you. CoH is not
that fast paced. Because at a certain point improving further means doing things in a way that's no longer fun/feelgood and
winning becomes the main gratification. Not actually driving a Tiger around and "wow haha that was a huge blast" sort of fun. Sports are fun... until you play to win against the best. Then it becomes a job of optimizing everything and working really hard.
Older people become more casual for a reason. Relaxed feels more fun and you don't care as much about impressing others. Related trivia on the subject is that there are no major physical holdbacks for a strengt training person to build muscle until the age of fifty compared to 20 year olds. People think so and claim lower testosteron levels to impact hugely. Truth is the drop is not that big and does not impact as much as most think.