Hey MissElita -
Same problem here. Solid machine (specs below), fast internet (200-300Mb/s d/u; see screenshot below), and I’ve tried all the steps you tried. Also went through dozens of other suggestions on forums to improve latency…
- updated everything
- whitelisted game in firewall
- disabled AV while playing (including Win defender w/ DefControl v1.6)
- closed all background apps other than game
- cleared all cache and temp files
- set battery usage to high performance
- fixed silly MS issues like allocating all bandwidth to me (not reserving 20% for updates, etc.)
No joy! Always have the yellow clock next to my name in ranked MP. Been particularly awful since the late May patch. Game and other players now frequently crash, which sucks if they’re on your team. All this nonsense has hurt my ELO a lot 
Maybe this is Microsoft-Steam problem? Or an AOE2DE-Win10 issue?
If anyone knows the solution, please help!!! And MS peeps, please fix this game esp MP drops
- 250GB SSHD (where game is installed)
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 w/ 16MB of RAM