I mean, how else are we supposed to judge it? There's no objective, publicly-notarized way of saying a class is trash, but the outcry against the Ranger occupied two UA articles (possibly three if you include modifying classes with the Spell-less Ranger).
I mean, while the response certainly drives it, in their introductions to those Unearthed Arcanas they pretty much say themselves that the Ranger is messed up.
UA08: Ranger Options
UA18: The Ranger, Revised
That WotC didn't end up implementing it doesn't say anything about this: like many companies, they likely made a cost-benefit analysis as to whether completing it was worth it. I suspect they didn't want a bunch of players to feel like their books were suddenly invalidated, even if they ended up fixing the Ranger for the better. The fact that they spent a good year or so looking to fix the class should say enough, whether or not they ended up implementing anything.
They never needed to because the Ranger was their testbed to see if it would be worth it to change something that was obviously broken at a fundamental level. Why start trying to fix a bunch of classes when it may not come to fruition and inadvertently reveal that other classes are looked at as being pretty broken as well?
The ranger was used because it was basically universally agreed upon to the point that it wouldn't be controversial to actually put that out there. You try fixing the fighter before that and you run into people who think the fighter should be the most no-frills class out there as well as getting people going "Wait, why are we not fixing the ranger first?" When they ended up not doing it
I mean, yeah, it does. That's the whole point of the saying.
I feel like you getting the idiom wrong and then being like "Whatever" is an amazing metaphor for the particular discussion we are having.