QS and THE suffer from the exact same issues that USNews does - it’s all a beauty contest.
Because it focuses on American colleges and high schools.
Despite the USA being the #1 destination for international students (the USA has the largest number of non-USA citizens in its universities), these are just 5% of the students in American 4 year colleges.
According a 2019 student, rankings had a smallish but important effect on the decisions that students made as to which college to attend.
Evidently this is shifting, because a large reason why the rankings were used was not because even that amount was based on prestige, but because rankings were an easy tool to tell students which colleges were “good”. Now there are better online tools which allow personalized “rankings”, which are far more informative to students than USANews type rankings.