A good tautology can be helpful in revealing errors in reasoning. Like here, the sentence "ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to" sounds reasonable; the equivalent statement "best reasoning is the most persuasive" is clearly wrong.

“Stating tautologies is sometimes necessary in the presence of those who believe self-contradictions” - paraphrased from weird sun twitter

True.

And a good tautology like this one can at least help people realize the difficulties in distinguishing merit from success.

Which puts it up a step from overconfident generalizations.

Which is funny, because that's also a decent lay-explanation of how PageRank works.