Why are relatively unknown players often in chess.com Top 5?

This question has bothered me for a while now.

One would expect the world's top players also to be at the top of the chess.com ratings, right? But the highest Rapid rating here on chess.com has Eric Hansen who is "only" number 229 in the World Ranking. The second- and third-highest ratings have Sean Winshand Cuhendi (World Ranking number 1'567!) and Andrey Gutov (World Ranking number 3'253!).

Now, of course the ratings here can change quickly and some fluctuations are to be expected. I wouldn't be surprised if number 10 or even 20 in the world would be on top once. But players who aren't even in the top 1000??? Doesn't make any sense to me. Does anyone know the reason for this?

ppl dont play a lot of rapid, only blitz and bullet.

Rapid leaderboard?
It's very rare for strong players to play rapid online. That's the easy explanation for rapid.

For blitz, I think most of them don't care about online blitz. Any young top 100 FIDE player could be competitive for the blitz leaderboard. It's just a matter of whether they want to burn 20 hours a week practicing online blitz.

At high ratings, there are 2 major problems with online rapid (cheating and stalling).

But other than this, I have a theory that 10 minutes doesn't make sense as a time control for strong players. My idea is that if you graph time spent vs quality of move, it would be logarithmic. For example 80% of the strength may come from the first 20 seconds of thinking time.

The better a player gets, the smaller this window becomes. In a top level tournament, they might spend 20 minutes on a move, but only because they're trying to squeeze out that last 1-2% worth of quality... and for good reason. In a top tournament it may only take 1 relatively minor mistake to lose the game.

Anyway, this means very fast and very slow time controls make sense, but the middle time controls are an awkward no man's land. Even if there were guaranteed 0% cheating, I don't think GMs would naturally choose 10 minute games.

Which of course only exacerbates the problem. If you're only interested in, let's say, 3|0 and 60|0, then your rapid games are a much larger time investment than someone who is satisfied with 10|0.

Amazingly, @chessbrah is the #1 rapid player, and has only played 3 (THREE) rated rapid games against a player above 2200.

The most recent of those 3 was 11 months ago.

High rated rapid players almost don't exist. It's either cheaters or accounts like his (who are on the leaderboard for becoming "active" by playing unrated games).