This is some of the laziest SEO advice I've ever seen, and I just wish it would disappear into a black hole because I'm constantly having to address it. The amount of backlinks you or your competitor has doesn't matter.
Search engines like Google and ChatGPT do not rank pages based on the number of backlinks they have. It ranks them based on how much it trusts the content, meets the searcher's needs, combined with how much it trusts your site. Yes, backlinks building is a big part of that trust, but it isn't, oh, this page has got 10,000 links, so we trust it.
They're looking at how relevant the link is, who is linking to you and why. E. do they trust that site to endorse yours, and then how many links you have like that.
A lot of the time when people are buying link building packages, they are from spamy, low quality sites that search engines don't really trust. You should be focusing your time, money, efforts, resources, whatever it is you've got available to high quality links. If the number of backlinks alone actually determined whether or not you'd rank, Google would be in an even worse state than what it is right now.