If I have shit load of money to invest in the proper organic traffic-generating, niche-relevant website to skyrocket brand building and let the Forbes-like SEO speak for itself, you will realize how easy offpage is. Don't overthink d0follow vs N0follow.
As far as I'm concerned, a link is useless if it has no traffic potential in one way or the other, either through SERPs or from within the link itself.
Get sticky links from Forbes, Huffington post, Techrunch and a bunch of 50 of them like that within 4-8 weeks. You won't even have to ask this question again.
Your branding will go crazy, you will rank for authority keywords and related searches in your niche. It's what I have analyzed about big brands over the years. Their SEOs rarely do offpage SEO beyond this. Right after launch, they get the brand talked about within 2-4 weeks and see the magic. Of course we are talking about $50,000+ here as 1 link on ssy Forbes will cost no less than $1000 if you are lucky.
So what makes is look like offpage is hard is because an average Joe can't shell out insane money like that on link building, so they or we embrace other means like pbn, web 2.0s, guest post (that's not shitty as low quality PBNs), forum links, and what not..blah blah. So go figure.
Money = easy offpage
No more = sweat + time = no easy offpage
Onpage can almost always be done overnight if you have only a couple 100 pages.