Let’s face it: we largely privilege Shakespeare more than other writers today because it’s always been that way.
Or perhaps because his writing is so brilliant that it deserves the attention and devotion given to it. In fact, it hasn’t “always been that way” — it took a century or more for Shakespeare to be perceived as significantly superior to his contemporaries — but maybe it’s that way now for reasons other than the power of crowd behavior. That people gradually realized the greatness of Shakespeare because Shakespeare is indeed great ought to be one of the options on the table, and it’s slightly comical how terrified scholars are of entertaining that possibility.