Does HOMA-IR produce meaningful results if you are on a very low carb diet? If you eat a "normal" diet and your bg is normal because you are producing large amounts of insulin to overcome the insulin resistance then a HOMA-IR test will reveal it. If you do not produce much insulin because you are not eating any carbs then it is not surprising that HOMA-IR is low.
In this case "normal" needs to be defined. I have been studying even more than ever what the Hadza, Maasai eat, with the first hand accounts of Paul Saladino, Brian Sanders and Mary Ruddick within the last few weeks. I would say with a huge generalisation that the normal of all ancestral eating patterns is 10's of food choices compared to over 600, 000 in the West.
One of the "normals" always correlates with minimal metabolic syndrome (with very small outliers), the other "normal" correlates with circa 80% metabolic syndrome.
Taking a common sense approach, I would say the best "normal" in the last 70 years or so was the "meat and 2 veg" period, where there were some treats (occasionally), but there was correlationary less non-communicable disease, people were visibly slimmer, guidelines, apps, WW, Slimmers World and the like were not needed.
"Normal" for me is not defined by the modern desire to have "sweet" or "carbs" with everything (not saying this is your meaning), but this is what is usually what is the end result of "normal" eating. The same goes for definitions such as "I was eating healthy" - this again can be interpreted.