Actually, I have read some commentators say that the transfer portal has hurt the factories more than lower teams for this reason. According to them, the factories used to be three to four deep at four star players who would wait until their JR or SR year to start. When they lost the four/five star DE to injury a four/five star DE took over. When he was injured or needed to rest, another four/five star DE took over. When he needed to rest, another four/five star DE replaced him. Those 3rd/4th string players are not waiting to start any longer and transferring to a place where they can start and get NIL money. Even 2nd strings in some cases.
I haven't gone through rosters and analyzed transfers to be able to say that this is correct. However, it would help explain why football seems to be more even this year than it has been the past 10 years or so. There are still several undefeated teams, but there aren't any that are clearly unbeatable. If this was a BCS year, you could just as easily draw numbers as decide who the best two teams in college football are.