Well, not really, when you look at the context. When the Ranger was created, as the forest Aragorn guy...well, 1) was being based on Aragorn, who was -as was Middle Earth- accustomed to fairly temperate foresty places.Clerics have a clear enough basic identity: fighting priests. You can subvert that by making them not part of a church or changing how they fight, but the basic trope still exists.
A wizard without a spellbook won't make people forget that wizards usually have spellbooks.
But rangers just have "often found on forests" as a core trope, which is... a weak thing to base a DnD class on.
2) D&D of the day was essentially in wooded, temperate terrain. Nearly universally. Deserts and jungles were rare, odd and just plain "alien" types of terrain/cultures to find. The people from such areas were exotic and mysterious. The D&D "default" was for a land of forests, mountains, rolling hills and fields -for the elves, dwarves, and halflings to live in, if nothing else- basically temperate/four seasons (that seemed nearly always to be in spring, summer, or early fall) in nature.
Given that, basing a class archetype on "a guy good at living/surviving/adventuring in forests" seems like a pretty central and solid idea.