He's fat.
He's almost certainly the best fattie, but he's still fat. He's fat and that means he's easy to hit. His recovery isn't actually all that stellar, and he's fat, so it's easy to hit him out of it. Just boop him once, boop him again, and his upB isn't that good, so, whoops, he's dead, because he's fat.
He has some good qualities, like a good dashdance and pretty good range, but he's still fat, which means that any movement is kind of mitigated in how good it is at getting him out of the way of something, since more space means bigger hurtbox. He has good range and a pretty good offstage game, but his nB isn't very good, meaning he doesn't have a projectile, and relies on that omvement, which, again, is mitigated by him being fat. Being fat and fast means he's better than the other fatties, but he still gets shut down by the good few character that are just faster and not fat, or those that outrange him by enough, or who can dominate space with projectiles that he doesn't have many good tools to deal with. That means pretty much all the spacies, plus swordies, plus speedies like Falcon. And... those guys are really important in the meta. Struggling against them pushes you down in the tier list by virtue of how common and important they are. Zard is the best fattie, but he's still fat. All those disjoints and projectiles are harder to deal with when you're fat, since they're just that much easier to connect with.
Did I mention that he's fat?