Technical health is a floor, not an engine. It clears the path for a page to be crawled, indexed, and considered, but it does not supply a reason to rank, so a flawless site with nothing relevant, authoritative, or in demand behind it has nothing to rank for. Treating technical perfection as sufficient is the assumption the question quietly breaks; clean technicals are the entry fee, not the win.
What that fee buys is consideration, and the race is run on different ground. A page rises because it matches the intent behind a query, because the site has built topical depth around that subject, because other sites vouch for it, because there is real demand for what it covers, and because it carries the experience and trust Google weighs most heavily in sensitive areas. A technically immaculate page that sits at position fifteen is almost always missing one of those, not a faster server. You can polish markup and load times indefinitely and never touch the layer that actually decides the ranking.
This is why the order matters in both directions. A weak technical base genuinely holds a site back, so it has to be solid before the rest can work; but once it is solid, more technical polish stops moving the needle, and the gains come from relevance and authority instead. Competition and timing play their part too, since a new or under-linked page can be perfect and still wait, or still be outmatched by stronger pages for the same query.
So the reader stops polishing technicals once they are sound and starts building relevance and authority, treating the clean foundation as the thing that lets the real ranking work happen rather than as the work itself.