Does a smurf pool actually exist?

I've played a lot of games recently since school work has calmed down. I want to ask the community -and valve-, does it actually exists and what even is the purpose of a smurf pool?

I kid you not the last 10 games that I have played in ranked in Dota 2 has been filled with smurfs, it's not even that I lose and find something to blame other than myself. It has gotten to the point where every game I queue at ~2000 MMR is filled with smurfs running rampant and flat out carrying the whole game beyond snowball levels. I even added a few because I won't be matched against them or with them since the player base is small (same pool of players nearly every game and familiar faces often) and queue times are extremely long (10-20 minutes EU West and EU East) and they even admit to smurfing.

I read Reddit and hear other people complaining about smurfs but often get flat out rejected and told off by the community that smurfs don't exist in our bracket and we're just blaming everything but ourselves. At this point, I'm just wondering how do I have so many smurfs in my game and if I'm in a smurf pool. I really don't think I'm a good player, and I don't have the best behavior score, but the amount of smurfs that I meet in the game just leads me to believe that it is not behavior score related, even when I was a relatively high behavior score I was still experiencing the same amount of games where it was completely out of my control and the smurf runs rampant.

There is genuinely no point playing Dota anymore if every game you are playing against people who are miles ahead skill-wise and "learning from it" is objectively some of the worst advice that does not warrant wasting losing hours of time getting stomped for the sake of "learning from smurfs". Uninstalling until Valve actually does something about this recurring issue is the only course of action 😀

TLDR since I know a lot of Dota 2 Reddit users see "Smurf" proceed to not read anything and comment objectively wrong statements and opinions that defend their agendas: Does the Smurf pool exist, if so, how do I get out or know when I am in a smurf pool.