I'm out ranking some competitors who have a higher page authority than I do. How important is PA really?

I'm publishing a lot of blog posts lately but as Google States, "people first" content and I'm starting to rise very high in the search engines. Now some of these horrible websites that we're competing against and have a million more backlinks than us are ranking lower than us. We hardly have any backlinks and these are some pretty good long tail keywords that I'm finding with both Ubersuggest and semrus, so I'm wondering what I'm actually doing right by ranking higher than my competitors who have higher page authority? I'm using all the Google stuff like bread crumbs, structure markup, XML sitemaps, I must be doing something right but I'm still amazed. I would love your insights.