why are lower rated players harder to beat?

There's a "solution" to that. You don't play them anymore and you stop trying different tactics and traps and can go back to enjoying chess.

whoever said i'm still on tilt is probably correct, aggravating. perhaps the deeper issue is i'm somehow suddenly becoming worse the more that i play

take a break!  play something else for a bit and then come back with a clear mind.  

Also put less focus on winning, and more on finding the best move I know when I do I play better.

@kpcollins86 Nghtstalker has some good advice too, try to focus on playing the best move each turn, make sure you are checking for all of the opponents 1-move threats and simple tactics, always asking yourself "what's the threat behind this move?" every turn.

I'm really new so still really low rated (and rightly so) and I guess not having openings and strategies planned means we're more unpredictable down here.  Also, I've noticed it's crazy aggressive, I was really surprised in my first few games that their queen was coming at my back line by turn 4 and I was still trying to set up an opening.  But I'm sure I'm missing a lot of their mistakes and how to punish them at the moment, so just an observation.

One of the things you will notice as you improve and go past 1200+ is that your opponents will not go crazy insane making moves, which will make the game a lot more interesting... However, to reach that level, it's likely that you will have to play against a lot of insanity here, which is frankly quite disappointing (the OP made good points about this)

You might be playing against Google from time to time. lol

If a person is trying to win a game at the 800ish level a hyperaggressive unsound attack becomes a pretty solid strategy because it induces mistakes especially from those who are worrying about constructing openings that are sound enough to hold up to expert level play and thus aren't thinking fluidly. The book doesn't tell you much about what to do about a wild queen attack or about some guy whose sole goal in the opening is to slam a piece into the f2/f7 pawn to force the king off the back rank. 

There is stuff to learn from this about spotting tactics and improvising king safety, which are issues in every game. They just come more quickly when the opponent is determined to immediately sac a bishop to make shambles of your kingside or to get the queen out an marauding in the first three moves. 

Typically, in the end, you learn pretty much nothing from that kind of game, except maybe to keep your cool. However, it's actually not worth playing that kind of game.

Better players are not fazed by weaker players who try to do this....  I still can be though. lol

Players who don't know what they're doing are actually instructive to play against, because it means they're making unconventional/unusual moves. It can feel tricky, at times, because they aren't playing moves that you've studied or prepped against.

But then comes the fun part: finding the weaknesses in their moves, and the flaws in their position.

There are some bots on here that play dubiously aggressive moves. They're good to practice against, if you find those styles hard to beat.

Well, except for improvising king safety, changing plans on the fly, spotting tactics and pretty much all of chess other than the sort of theory battles that really only matter at the expert level at longer time controls. 

What all of this amounts to is beginner level players wanting to be experts without battling through the ranks to develop actual expertise. They blame losses on the opponents erratic play and complain that their opponents don't resign rather than address the flaws in their games and way of thinking that make them exploitable. You get to play expert style chess when you are expert style non-exploitable.  

All games get off book and messy at some point. There is a point where you actually have to get into the trenches and battle, and that comes sooner when an opponent goes rogue. 

I used to see this in poker. I'm kinda surprised to see it in a game with far less variance. 

i think i'm just not smart/intuitive enough to retain all my "anti cheese" skills once i get out of the "trash zone" rating wise. once i get up around 1300 and people don't play kook style, my ability to respond to that style diminishes drastically because I'm not constantly trying to calculate or recall the proper response to trick openings every single game now. i also find it interesting looking back, advancing from 1200-1300 was way, way, way easier than going from 1100-1200. like, a million times easier. i feel like the dynamic of the game changes drastically as rating goes up. lower rated games feel more like a video game, and i suck at video games.    

Looking at your last two losses you were clearly winning late in both games. Getting whacked in the late game has nothing to do with cheese and it for sure isn't something that will be easier against better players.

Blaming that on the opening seems a pretty wild stretch. 

well a lot of it just has to do with being tilted at this point

i did go through a stretch after my rating dropped below 1200 where i had like 10 games in a row that all had goofy openings. it gets infuriating after a while

It's simple actually. Us beginners usually play weird openings because we don't know good chess strategies. (It doesn't work for me though. I have lost 13 of 16 games I have played.)

By the way, someone may have already mentioned this, but I think the lowest rating is 100.

well, I'm certainly on my way then