There's a weird nuance to this just because algorithmically PageRank itself was even somewhat anti-competitive.

"This page has fewer links to it than others, therefore it will be buried in search results"

I think most people appreciated Google's early search algos that prioritized "well-traffic'd" sites and sources over others. Obviously that was a long time ago before SEO (and Google themselves) destroyed everything. Back then there were actually still competitors in the search market so it didn't matter. Not the case now.