SEO Strategy to Rank EMD website

Lately, I've been noticing an interesting trend in the online gaming niche--there's been a noticeable rise in Exact Match Domains (EMDs) quickly climbing the ranks, even outranking well-established authority sites for some pretty competitive keywords.
What stands out is that these EMDs often follow a fairly straightforward approach:
Simple, barebones websites with minimal attention to design or functionality
A large volume of backlinks--mostly from blog comments--using exact-match anchor text directed at the homepage
Content that appears to be largely AI-generated, with little evidence of human refinement

And yet, despite the lack of polish, many of these sites aren't just ranking for their exact-match keywords--they're also showing up for a broader range of related terms.

Curious about the trend, I experimented with an EMD strategy myself. But my results didn't quite match up to what I was seeing elsewhere, which naturally raised some questions in my mind:
What's really driving these results? Is there something under the hood that I'm missing, or is it just a short-term loophole in the algorithm?