Climbed to Gold and can no longer rely on my opponents being bad, unsure what to do

Preface: I'm a Gold 4 support main, my picks are Janna > Taric with the occasional Lulu or Nami.

In Silver, I had a relatively easy way of winning the lane. When I AAd a Twitch with my way lower AA range, he didn't respond and I got some free poke off. Enemy Leona engaging? It was either so telegraphed I would easily nado it, or the enemy ADC didn't follow up and we 1v2d the living hell out of the poor support. (Hook supports were generally easy to beat because they were so bad at actually hooking.) Later in the game, no ward I set was dewarded and people ignored my pink ward after waltzing through its bush two times.

But now that I climbed to Gold, it's suddenly become much harder. People actually buy Sightstone/Sweeper and properly deward me, and every time I run around with my sweeper I get flustered because how the hell did they ward here and how dumb I was for waltzing through it like five times before sweeping it? When I go in for some poke, I'm met with an intense retaliation and regularly drop to half HP just for landing an AA. Before sometimes I actually got hooked on purpose so we could trigger a fight, but now I can't do this or we lose. Since I can't exploit everyone else being bad, how can I secure leads and win the game if everyone's on equal fields? Especially on passive early supports like Taric or Janna. Should I just embrace the "be a ward- and shield bot" view?