Links are still the super-major-almost-100% factor in determining ranking though, whether you call it PageRank or some other algorithm.

It's why buying expired domains and throwing your totally unrelated content on them works great.

It's why subdomain/folder leasing is a thing where affiliate sites will pay "high PR" sites to reverse proxy a subdomain or folder to them and (that's the important part) link to it from their main site. And boy, does that work. The same content that would be > page 100 suddenly is in the top 3.

There are other factors, but they don't matter nearly as much as Google's "we have 200 factors that contribute to the ranking" stuff makes it seem. You can throw the most atrocious low quality content on a site with lots of incoming links and it will rank at the top.