There's a few filters to wrap your head around here. First there's the "has this person any real understanding of how to make music?" Probably 80% of music released is just plain bad music, no craft whatsoever. One person whose videos I watched a lot of, Mat4yo, dives a lot into the craft of composition, at least as it pertains to rap lyrics. It's where he starts giving feedback to other creators who send him their stuff where you really get a sense for what is good and what isn't good, and it's definitely a legible process.
Problem is, once you get over bad, once you've followed the rules that everyone else has followed, is where marketing and connections start to make a difference. But still, nobody's really going to care until and unless you can come up with something truly different that's also good. Bring an idea to a style from another style and make it cohesive. Play around with different types of lyrics and beats and energy levels.
I have a friend of mine whose been playing music for years put out an album of well, aggressively mediocre country-rock. No amount of connections and marketing is going to get anyone to care about it. There wasn't anything wrong with it, I just had zero interest in listening to it more than once. He needed to bring an order of magnitude more effort to the composition process to even come close to mildly interesting. This stuff literally fills the slush piles of music agents.
Once you have something new, good, and different, then marketing and connections again start to become important. Because there's literally nothing else that can move the needle.
