I've been trying to make sense of this update for some time since it came out, my website dropped in ranking by 1-5. These were also for very high competition keywords.
From what i can gather the update seems to favour websites with high authority or brand dominance.
The website\page doesn't even have good technical SEO, i have had a website rank higher than me with nothing in their technical SEO being in place, the only reason i could see for the website ranking higher was them having good backlinks, and possibly due to their brand image.
This update also seems to have given pages that are in a high authority website a boost, pages in high authority websites seems to now rank higher. They don't even need proper content or any technical SEO as long as their domain has high authority.
In other words this update doesn't seem to care much for content or technical SEO but rather backlinks and authority, this doesn't mean that having shit ton of crap links will help. It obviously needs to be decent quality backlinks.