Have they? Have they really? As far as I can tell, nothing that Netflix has ever done in-house has ever come close to the best of the cable channels. Like, The Witcher is fine, but Game of Thrones it is not, neither in quality nor buzz/cultural significance. House of Cards is no Succession and Ozark is no Breaking Bad. Nothing they have could even come close to comparing to stuff like The Sopranos or The Wire in terms of cultural impact. The closest they've ever come, in my opinion, is probably with Making a Murderer, and they've spent the last couple of years churning out pale imitations that make Netflix look like "True Crime TV".
You're paraphrasing that quote from the Netflix CEO that goes like "We want to become HBO faster than HBO can become us". To me, HBO has won that race handily.