Lol, u can check my threads to find a case study of what I do with content alone bringing thousands of traffic and dominating first page! But I never brag about how content alone is so powerful, it's a proof of the power of keyword research.
I Dare you in front of the whole forum to do an experiments on a keyword we know and agree it's even medium difficulty, where it has any sort of decent backlinks, and outrank it with content alone

---> Deal ?
Or if you don't want us to waste ur time, we can get a Mod and show him the hard difficulty keyword u ranked in without any backlinks ---> Deal ?
Backlinking is the biggest factor in ranking and according to ahrefs study on over 2M keywords first page results, backlinks factor accounts for .6 while on-page optimization accounts for .4
The only way to outrank someone in first page with content alone, is if he was ranking using content alone