Here's a deal, overall content is king but backlinks are about 23% effect on your rankings and you can't ignore it. let's assume you make awesome content, better and longer than top 10 results of your keyword and if these sites have good and relevant high-quality backlinks then you'll never gonna rank on top 10, if so, it will take time.

On-page(content) is like your 60% of work is completed and 40% left that is off-page.

Let's take one more scenario If your content is not good or sort of average not better than first-page result and you build a higher number of backlinks hoping that now my site will rank then again, you're totally wrong. Google wants best content for their users.

Backlinks are like giving Google signals and trust that my site is better than all other which you are ranking at first. and then google ranks you high and when users click and bounce back unsatisfied or ignoring your site and clicking to site below your site, gives google strong signal, sorry, your signals said your site is good but doesn't help much to our users, so go a bit below.

To Rank well without backlinks

Go for less competitive keywords and start getting traffic and when your site will get higher DA then move to high competition. Gradually you will get many natural links but only if your content would be up to mark.