You are giving way too much importance to EWC, most teams treat the qualifiers as a "if we go, we go" situation where they are basically already planning their trials and scrims in the case they do not qualify. There is only a small handful of teams that cares thoroughly about EWC, which is usually the teams that did not qualify to Masters and are looking for something to celebrate while not planning on roster changes. (See: FNC, M8, KC etc).

EWC should be below both Masters, ask any player if they would rather win a Masters or EWC, which really is only relevant because of the size of the prize pool. There is simply way too much shady and outright proven wrong about their events for it to be above an official Major.

Being okay in Funhavers and Ranked does not nearly qualify you to be in T2, let alone T1. My guess (I have not seen him in trials so this is purely speculation and second hand info) is he thinks himself to be above half the players who actually have a better average level across the skillsets required to be a T2+ competitor, and thus not improving on it enough to be taken serious in the trials he gets. It's a fairly common issue with players who gain notoriety through ranked to assume they are on top of the world already, while the real climb has not even really started.

TLDR: "Dropping 50s in ranked" is not nearly enough to be a serious competitor.

ULF also isnt just "some T2 team", this is a team that is arguably the strongest in their region too with players that are on many VCT teams watchlist.