Is it too late to start playing?

It’s never too late. I started in March 2018 after watching countless amounts of videos. When I started playing I NEVER thought I would get better and made the stupidest mistakes. You’ll get better with time, but it isn’t too late to start playing. The game is thriving.

I started playing a little over a year ago, and in my experience the game kind of goes like the following as you play more:
Hard>Easy>Hard>Medium>Easy>(killer)Easy/(Survivor)Hard>(Killer)Hard/(Survivor)Easy
Hard:
at first you'll loose match after match simply because you just don't know what to do and how to do it, so you'll find yourself dying quickly as survivor since you can't outrun killers very well, and hiding seems impossible
Easy:
You finally understand the controls, and even when you team doesn't do much of anything you can survive for most of the match now that you understand maps a little better and know what constitutes a safe hiding spot, and as killer you get good enough at tracking/guarding that you can secure at least one or two kills per match...until you hit rank 15
Hard:
you die a lot, and get flashlight and pallet stunned a lot. to put it simply you are now playing with such a wild range of skill levels that some matches will fly by super fast where you don't even break a sweat, and other matches keep you on the edge of your seat the entire time and despite all your best efforts you just get stomped every match. If you want to get out of this phase fast don't do what I did and try to unlock every perk for killer and survivor right away, instead pick out a few good perks, unlock those and just focus on making a powerhouse survivor or 2-3 really powerful killers...those add-ons and rank 3 perks really make a difference
Medium:
You finally made it to green ranks, and while you lose a good number of matches, players start to be more predictable in their skill, allowing you to lean more heavily on your teammates as a survivor, and as a killer it allows you to pretty easily mind game survivors
(Killer)Easy(Survivor)Hard:
Purple ranks tend to be about the point where things start to diverge on the two sides in terms of match difficulty. As a survivor you start to run into more and more killers that have good rank 3 perks, and have a lot of powerful addons that make surviving much harder than in was for a while, and the over confidence of making it to a higher rank tends to make survivors more reckless meaning you can't always count on a team of randoms at this rank. As a killer this makes things easy, as all too often a survivor will get way too cocky and end up overextending themselves, giving you a pretty easy kill...too bad it doesn't stay that way forever
(Killer)Hard(Survivor)Easy:
Finally in the red ranks, now survivors are also fully spec'd out and have been persistent long enough to make it to the top...or they run with a really good team to quickly climb the ranks. As survivor you can typically count on the people your playing with to have A LOT of experience as survivor, so you can almost gaurentee they know how to keep the killer busy, pound out those generators, and sneak in at the last moment for that hook save, which makes the killers life tougher than any other point in the game

I guess all that is to say, its tough at first, but if you don't like the current difficulty you might just have to play for a bit longer to get to a respite