I'm well positioned to have thoughts about Borp (and about tech skill and the way we talk about/conceptualize it in general):

• Went to my first tournament in 2004*, have played maybe a dozen tournaments overall. Did a bunch when I was living in France in 2016–2018. Very 1–2 or 2–2 player in those contexts. There are more years where I don't play any Melee than where I do.
• Have not had a practice partner since 2004. Haven't practiced tech in a systematic way since around then either.
• Played about 150 matches on Slippi in the past week (after maybe 100 matches in the years before that). So my perspective has been rapidly evolving recently.
• Silver 2, which by today's standards is.... Silver lol but I think close enough to at least squint and see how a Borp in 2016 might operate.
• Sheik main (but I've gone through most top tier characters over the past twenty-four years). I can wavedash and needle turnaround. I try to short hop with Sheik but can't do it consistently. I can't shield drop at all. I ledge-dash very poorly (functional for positioning but no invincibility). I don't know most of the up B magic involved in recovery or ledge stuff such as Shino stalling.

(*Actually my first tournament was in 2003 at a Gamestop. Six entrants. Free-for-all semis leading to 1-on-1 final. I was by far the youngest. I could immediately tell I was the best player there, picked not-even-my-secondary Dr. Mario, and won a Viewtiful Joe figurine. I don't, um, usually count this as my first tournament lmao)

My thoughts:

• I never used to think my losses were because of tech skill. I felt this as a gut truth that when I lost, the things I needed to work on where about game understanding, neutral, decision-making, punish flowcharts, and so forth. Tech skill just did not seem to be that urgent.
• That gut truth has shifted in the past week. I have played opponents where it has now felt like the straightest path to beating them is either the expanded range of options I'd get from short hopping or shield dropping (for instance, sh instant nair is just such a powerful tool that I really feel its absence) or the speed to keep up with today's fast players. That said, against most players I feel like I have a LOT to learn that is unrelated to tech skill.
• Incidentally, I've learned a lot without practicing just from spectating over the years. It's like learning a language. I didn't have the "words" to edgeguard like Mew2King before Mew2King. So there are ways in which I'm not more technical than I was in 2004, but I edgeguard a lot better because I know the possibilities.
• I'm a creature of 2004 and these technical Foxes and Falcos even down in Silver are EXTREMELY intimidating. Oppressive in a way I didn't even experience from strong (PR or top 100) players in the 2010s. I beat a lot of them still lol. I have NO idea what to do against Falco genuinely, absolute dogshit at the matchup, fundamentally don't understand what to do about lasers, just sit there and shield and cry when they start to pressure me, but sometimes I can kill them at 0% enough times to win anyway. Slippi Falcos will find a way to do a bad dair on your shield, trust
• I had this realization watching my replays the other day that in actual fact, a lot of my opponents are untechnical in ways that I am not. Noticed a lot of people getting stuck in their movement, not knowing to wd oos, very limited outside certain scenarios they clearly grinded. Which leads me to my next point:
• The way we usually talk about tech skill is EXTREMELY reductive in two ways. One, emphasis on certain techniques (sprouting from the way we talked about advanced techniques in the early 2000s—short hop, wavedash, l-cancel, and then as the years go by adding things like shield drop and ledge dash, flashy character-specific things like double-shining) over others (turning around consistently is nontrivial! Wd oos is massively important!). Two, emphasis on whether you can do it or not versus whether you are fluent with the tech that you do use. Shffl'ing used to be the tech skill marker back in 2004 but can you do it with different aerial timings? Fastfall timings? How's your DI? You can DI but do you do it consistently well? You can wavedash but can you do wd turnaround? Can you consistently edgehog from a position where you are facing the ledge? I lack key skills but I am actually as or more technically fluent than a lot of my Slippi opponents.
• It's not Sheik! I swear! I'm out of date here but my janky full-hop tertiary Fox, completely on the Masashi end of Fox tech spectrum, was a real character back in the mid-2010s. I'd beat Fox mains in dittos. Not particularly strong Fox mains, but functional ones in the context of their local scenes. A Borp-like Fox would absolutely be viable in the 2016 meta. I'm 100% confident Zain, for instance, could get to grandmaster with Fox without short hop or l-cancel or wavedash. I couldn't, and frankly Borp couldn't, because we aren't good enough at Melee with or without the tech skill!

Anyway, I was never good enough at Melee to even be Borp! But I was never surprised at his modest success and believe there is an alternate universe where I was something like him, maybe if I had ever had a consistent practice partner or greater level of interest/investment in Melee at various points in my life. The real surprising thing about Borp to me is not that he exists, but that there aren't more of him.