You know, I saw sites promoted by if I may put it so "lower quality" methods to climb and climb and climb, and when they get to the top, they will hit 40 places. Sometimes right away. Sometimes they get an exception, sometimes they get manual action.
What I mean to say is if you are at the top of competitive results, you can bet that Google will carefully review your site.
This can mean a deeper algorithmic analysis of your site or even a manual check. Google has tens of thousands of manual reviewers who have the quality of their results. Even today, I am cautious about all the sudden appearances at the top of the results, especially with a better page.