I don’t think that if Celeste was on store shelves next to games like Super Meat Boy, Hollow Knight, or Pizza Tower, all that info would help it be chosen out of the four games.
You're thinking of the novelty of an element of the product on a far larger scale than the market did. Celeste has novelty to it in some of the places I mentioned before, so I won't concede it has no novelty on the larger scale, but most importantly, it was novel in 2017-2018.
Marketing began it's popularity, word of mouth carried it to the finish line, and why would you share a game if it wasn't good?