Under Covid (and a lot of other reasons which are mentioned in alot of chees.com forums), a lot of people started plyng chess, you may have remembered the server crashes in january. Well my guess is since then alot of the players, abandoned there accounts at 700 and under and which meant the average rating went down alot especially as this boost in users was less than a year ago
Hope this helps
Sam 
This might not be a satisfying answer, but I think it all depends on what your goal is.
For example, I once heard a guy saying that he wants to become good enough at chess to beat all his friends, he wanted to be a "big fish in a small pond". So for him, a good ELO would probably be one that's better than his friend's. On the other hand, if you want to be world champion, your idea of a good rating will be very different.
It's also relative to how much effort you put into getting better. If you study for 2 hours every day and have been hovering around 1400 ELO for two years, that's probably not great. But if you only play a few casual blitz games over lunch and you make it to 1400, then that's probably quite impressive.
The beauty in chess, or frustration for some, is that you usually get paired with players of your strength. That means playing well consistently is always a challenge and the game keeps you on your toes. Some say not to worry about your rating at all and judge yourself by how happy you are with your play. Lichess has a cool feature where you can turn the ELO off. It is still there, but it's not displayed, neither yours nor your opponents, and you'd have to go into the depths of your account to find out your rating.
To me, a good rating is my own one plus 200 
. Right now I can win the occasional game against against people around 1600, but don't stand a chance against people 1800 and up, so I guess for me the "great at chess" category starts at 1800.
"Good" is such a relative term ... ;-P
As you point out, percentile tells you nothing about absolute ability, unless you understand the population. I'd rather be in the 1st percentile of GMs than in the 99th percentile of people who just started playing chess!
And as you probably know, rating is a measure of your performance against people in your rating pool. And while there's overlap between long-time control OTB players and short-time control chess.com players (and everything in between), those are different pools that require somewhat different skill sets (and rating methods vary as well!). Ratings across pools are undoubtedly correlated, but the correlation is probably not very tight.
ANYWAY ... here's my own minimally informed take on things:
0-500 = noob
501-1000 = has a clue
1001-1200 = serious beginner
1201-1400 = you can legitimately call yourself a chess player
1401-1600 = you can call yourself good, in a very modesty kind of way
1600+ = starting to have serious skillz ... I've not ventured very far into the territory above that, so I have no idea what happens next.
Yes, 2600 is God like status.
Hi thanks for reading my post. I'm getting confused on what a good ELO is on chess.com. I've read that 1300 is still a beginner rating and 1600 is intermediate level but the percentiles are saying something else.
I think this has changed because when you look at the percentile the player in a 1260 rapid rating(Which I have) is a 92.8 percentile which in any type of endeavour the rating is considered very good.
Are the percentiles being inflated because there are so many new players now?
I would love to hear your thoughts on what you think a good ELO is and how the percentiles fit in to the equation and what categories the ELO fit into now at each level? If 1260 is good based on the high percentile then would that make a 2000 excellent and a 2600 a God like status. What would be considered beginner and intermediate now?
I think beginner is around 800 now and 1200 might be the new intermediate and 1600 is a very talented player. 2000 and above is like a chess God.
I look forward to hearing from you...