The rankings themselves don’t really mean much. However, as others have stated, the lists often include information which can be important in deciding whether to apply to a college.
For example, the percent acceptance rate of a college shouldn’t be taken as an indication of how objectively “good” the college is. However, it is helpful to know, when applying to colleges - you don’t want to only apply to colleges which accept fewer than 15% of their applicants.
Endowment is important when thinking about whether to attend a private school, since it will tell you what the impact of something like the present pandemic could be, and, in some cases, whether the school will even stay open until you graduate. It will not, however, tell you whether the college is “good”.
Certain measures are useless, like the faculty to student ratio, since, not only is it very easy to manipulate, and easy to use to provide a very different picture of what the actual reaching experience is like. the “opinion of Top Academics” (to use the language employed by USNews) are also useless, since these are not actually academics, but administrators, who usually have little understanding of actual teaching, and spend an inordinate amount of time searching for easily quantifiable measures of success. The measures they choose tend to be easily quantifiable, but rarely have any meaning. They are also circular (a college is “good” if it has a high USNews rank, so they will rank colleges this year based. in a large part, on the college’s USNews ranking on the previous year).
The lists often have all sorts of information that students find important in deciding whether to attend a college. So, the actual rankings of Niche are useless (based on their rankings, Ivies are The Best At Everything, even at majors which they do not have, and expensive private colleges are ALWAYS better than public ones). However, Niche and some other sites provide students opinions of food and faculty behavior, student politics and characteristics, etc.
Of course these should be taken with a sack or two of salt, since they are a skewed sample, and provided anonymously, but when there are opinions which are shared by a large number of students, and the opinions are strong enough to induce the students to submit them, they are often useful knowledge, so long as one knows that these can be games as well (it is always possible to get a few hundred people to mob a site, so you can get 400 similar opinions which are not from students who attended a college).
Sometimes professional societies will provide their own rankings, which are more useful than those produced by entities like USNews. However, even in these there is often control of the leadership of some societies by the graduates of a small number of colleges, so these colleges will, of course, always appear at the top of every ranked list produced by the societies.