it depends...
If the keyword is easy and your domain is decent in terms of authority (backlinks) you can rank with garbage content. I have an autoblog that has had GPT-2 autogenerated content (like ArticleForge) published onto it last year and it ranks #5 with that garbage content for one long tail keyword simply because nobody on google's 1st page targets that keyword, so google has nothing better to rank and ranks my shit LOL.
So, if you manage to find such keywords that nobody covers you can rank with any type of content as long as you put the keyword in the title of page and include some LSI keywords throughout the article, you don't even need an image ALT tag (I have no image in that article, by the way).
Of course, another big reason for which this garbage content ranks is also because the domain has a lot of RDs (370 more precisely), so this matters too...
But if you were against tough competition (everyone on google's 1st page had their content optimized for that keyword and had backlinks pointing to their content) you'd definitely need better content