I mean, that's basically the core of original Google pagerank, right? A "good" site linking to another site is what makes that other site some amount of "good" too, links from better sites carry more 'juice'. "good" is of course not just binary, but a quantitative weight.
I don't know to what extent that's still at the core of their relevancy rankings. I don't know how all those annoying spammy recipe blogs or content farms get to the top of the results either. I don't think it's because Google's engineers believe they are "good" results.
Relevancy ranking on web search is clearly a hard problem, mainly because so many authors are trying to game it, it's a feedback loop.
If Google can only do as google does despite pouring a whole lot of money into it, I don't see a reason to bet that better will be what's basically an over-simplified description of how Google started out doing it (and then evolved it because it wasn't good enough).