Competitors with shitty backlinks ranking - why?

So, for seo I tried buying bulk links about 5 years back. It never worked out, trying out different links for different websites. Most good links are sooo expensive (and hard to find for tiny websites) that it's usually cheaper to reach out to actual niche magazines etc.

Now, I have always relied on writing blogs and it has always paid off.

However for quite a few niches I notice pretty high vol kws being ranked by websites with no blogs at all, just a bunch of backlinks that do not make a lot of sense to me.

For some low kd difficulty kws in my native language (dutch) I would love to rank just by buying backlinks.

Is that possible in any way? Am I missing something? As much as I love writing blogposts and doing white hat seo, I do not want to miss out on easy gains.