Just grind like that until level 18 and you can actually fight people
You get 100 bonus points for survivor. You get 50 points each for assists. So if there's someone dominating the fight and killing everyone, shoot at targets you can deal with. You only need to get two assists - or get lucky and get a kill - and you're even points with the "hide" tactic but you actually learn something about playing the game as well. Three assists or a kill and an assist and you come out ahead. If all you do is hide, you'll get to level 18 and still only know how to hide.
Plus, level 18 is 19351 XP, so it would take you 111 DM matches to get to it with a purely hiding approach, or about 13 hours. You want to grind rank by hiding for 13 hours, go ahead, be my guest ... but you could get the same rank in 2-5 hours by learning how to fight and scoring some proper points.
(I've seen level 1 beginners win matches with top players in before - the two top players spend most of the time beating each other up to stop the other running away with the lead and don't score much, and a level 1 who knows how to fight from doing it in the main game kills all the other level 1s who bought the game yesterday to take the victory)
Pip management is 250% extra shielding if you get it right.
Lateral thrust can be infinite extra shielding if you're fighting someone who doesn't know how to use it so can't turn fast enough to shoot back.
Sticking close to terrain rather than joining the "new player ball" in open space means you can hide behind it and the strong player spots you last.
Compared with that, the 10-20% performance boost that the upgrades can give you is trivial.