Well he did win a title. Would you trust the Lerners to find a better GM if they fired Rizzo! I don’t. The Soto trade looks good but could be a slam dunk if Wood becomes a very good players. If he and Crews are good he’s back in the saddle again.
No good GM would last here. Let's say they hired the next Andrew Friedman, who could win with a small payroll. They would meddle in decision making and more importantly, require that person to be their mouthpiece for their unusual decisions or to cover up for them, and come up with nonsense like "Strasburg will be at ST to mentor". If he wasn't, they'd bring in a President over that GM, like Stan Kasten was, who would make it difficult for the good GM to operate with any kind of authority. Bowden was not a great GM, but he wasn't a mouthpiece either, and any good GM would get Kastened here like he was.
Getting a valuable player in return for Juan Soto or with the #2 overall pick would not make him a good GM. A good GM like Alex A with the Braves drafts and develops talent without having to throw away 5+ seasons or trade a top player who has 2.5 seasons left before free agency. Or if a team does tank, a good GM like Mike Elias drafts and develops a succession of players, not one or two, who can sustain high performance for limited payroll for a long time, and without the defensive PR.
Re: the title, with 40% of the league making the playoffs now, it just takes a run at the end of the season. The 2019 Nats were a wild card team that got hot at the right time, much like the Rangers and Diamondbacks last year.
Rizzo is a bad GM who is still here because of his PR role. He'd be long gone and would likely lose a political battle with a President of Baseball Ops who would be placed in between him and the Lerners if he wasn't a mouthpiece. But if he was at least mediocre, he would at least draft and develop far better than he has. Yes, the Lerners demand a mouthpiece who will insult fans intelligence, but that would be less hard to take if 5 years into a tank and a few major trades later, we didn't still have zero top pitching prospects and nowhere near the hitting prospects pipeline of better run orgs.