Not exactly.
I mentioned the "how the 'top players'..." part because of this.
Thousands of scrubby players will never affect the supposed tier placement (misuse of character, inability to space, etc) more than a handful of good players ever will.
It's usually because the good players are the ones that kind of take the characters' [on-paper] games and weed out/use whichever strategies are actually viable. So if it turns out through tourney use by top Falcons that the 'goodness combo' (first hit N-air > footstool > ..repeat .. > B-air lock > force standup > Falcon Punch) is a viable strategy with setups (lol) and starts to take the scene by storm, then there's a good chance that he might end up going upwards lol.
With an example that I can relate with more - if you have hundreds of Sonic players who just use spindash and don't know how to space aerials, common conception will think that "LOL Sonic can't space, all u have to do is shieldcamp and punish OoS when he spindashes you". But then when a good player uses Sonic and demonstrates things like using his run speed and low-lag stop to space and set up counterattacks to approaches, space aerials, cancel spindashes to bait moves, then all of a sudden you get a peek into what the character can be capable of at the peak of their gameplay.
