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The issue is that, while writing skill is rare and somewhat objective, writing performance is intensely subjective. The experiment's been done where people take award-winning novels and throw them at the submission process... and don't even get past the query stage, 9 times out of 10. This is exacerbated by a climate wherein the "book buzz" that drives quick sales is generated by people who, while narrowly specialized in their professions and therefore deservingly relevant on specific topics, haven't read for pleasure since they were in high school.

Relevance can be measured. On the other hand, aesthetic quality is not only subjective, but highly relevant writing (such as Shakespeare's) changes the aesthetics on which it, as well as everything else, is judged.

Of course, most writers secretly long to still be read 100 years after they die, but not only will they never know this (except perhaps in an afterlife) for sure, but it's highly uncorrelated to performance while alive. If you had asked people in the 1920s which books of the time would be remembered in 2022, you'd be read a litany of works almost none of us have heard of... while Great Gatsby, which probably objectively is the great (as in, most relevant) American novel, would not have made the top 20.