Relative to most players, no doubt. To be fair though, even someone in diamond is "extremely good relative to most players".
I was a mid+ NA grandmaster zerg, and took games off players like EG demuslim. And even at the level I was at, fundamentals were the most important thing. And even at the level I was at, I could see the fundamental errors that I or my opponents would make.
Certainly though, when facing off a player of a similar skill, knowing the meta can be really helpful. Even more important is knowing that specific player's playstyle.
When you practice with a certain partner consistently, you start doing things that you would never do against an unknown player, to exploit quirks of their playstyle. The best players had incredible game sense and thus were really good at doing this. (My favorite player for a long time was Stephano, who absolutely excelled at this)
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I'm not sure I had an actual point I was making :P
I totally agree, I just think it's not great advice to say "if you want to get good go after the meta". Some gaming communities over emphasize the meta and IMO StarCraft is one of them. Meta is just one aspect of ways to get an edge and as you progress in your skill you need to take advantage of every edge you can get.
Many StarCraft streamers will do challenges where they only go for a certain, non dominate strategy to see how high they can rise, the one that stuck with me the most was destiny going mass queen. I saw so many people asking "what can counter mass queen" because they saw him winning over and over again. The answer wasn't how should you change your strat to deal with someone going mass queen, they aren't that good, the answer was to be better at macro than that player.
I used to be a huge Destiny fanboy. In fact, my measure of when I'd "made it" was when I could beat Destiny on ladder. (He beat me many times as well, of course).
Side note: Kind of sad that when I checked up him a couple months ago, he mostly just seems to do weird political debate style stuff these days
Right, I totally agree here. If it wasn't clear, I think the vast majority of players should just ignore the meta and focus on fundamentals.
That being said, often specific meta strategies (say, the 2 base sentry/immortal all-in that was so ridiculously powerful back in the day) give players a really hard time, and so IMO the best way to do it is to use learning how to beat the strategy as an example of learning fundamentals. For example, beating that all-in required effective scouting, map control, micro, and stopping drone production at the perfect time.