Here's what that looks like in practice. A US healthcare client I worked with had genuinely strong content sitting on pages that took 6+ seconds to load on mobile. Google saw the slow experience and quietly suppressed those pages in rankings, no matter how good the writing was. Once the technical layer was fixed, the content finally had a chance to perform, and traffic followed.
That's the pattern I see constantly: businesses investing in content and design while the technical foundation underneath silently caps their results. Fixing it doesn't create something new. It removes the ceiling that was already there.