No, I agree with that. Being good at marketing, networking and seeking opportunities and trends are skills. And I don't think that technical brilliance/execution is what matters. As you say, if you're good enough at selling yourself, you can be pretty mediocre/genetically NOT gifted at what you succeed in and do really well off it.

But at the same time, there are definitely success stories who just kinda stumbled into it too. Hell, I'd count myself in that camp too, at least at a certain level based on past experiences. I look at some of my past sites, and genuinely wonder how some of them took off. I was terrible at design, mediocre at best at coding, had little idea about marketing and had no network to speak of... and was beating out people who by all means should have done much better.

Even now, I've had people I admire complain that their years of effort on YouTube haven't paid off, while I somehow got three times the subscribers without knowing how to properly edit a video.

I know tons of people who stumbled to undeserving success, and tons of others who should have done well but didn't.