or at least it sucked as recently as 2 years ago.

FOR EXAMPLE...
well, here I go.

There are some districts with only 1 team in some age groups. There are other districts with numerous teams per age group.
My son was on the second of three teams in our district one year. It had only 2 designated X men. Both of them were barely X weight.
In the first 4 games of the season, they played teams with similar makeup as far as linemen goes. They beat all of them by numerous scores. Our skill players were very, very good.

When the conference assembled the second half of the schedule, they saw the my son's team had hammered everyone and put them against A teams in other districts. Not all districts are built the same.
The first game in the second half was against Hunter. The kids were 10 years-old, but their lines were loaded with kids weighing over 200 pounds. I"m not kidding. It was crazy.

we had kids on our lines who weighed under 100 pounds.
My son played corner and receiver, so he was mostly okay, but our poor linemen could do nothing to avoid contact.
we didn't care about who won or who lost. we had linemen getting hurt every couple of plays and we had several kids knocked out of the game with concussions.

When I mentioned the issue witrh scheduling, I was heckled and told that I didn't care about the schedule when it was my son's team winning big every week as if winning or losing was the concern.

I talked to one of the officials after the game was finished and he told me that he was embarrassed for the conference for scheduling the game. It was awful.