Conventional wisdom amongst leading SEOs is that links are still a major ranking factor alongside website performance, content, Rank Brain and so on.
Even Google recognises in its Webmaster guidelines that webmasters can improve the ranking of their sites by gaining natural authoritative links from high quality sites.
It is likely that the importance of links has diminished over the past decade as Google has sought to find other ways to rank websites less prone to manipulation.
Forgetting Google and other search engines for a moment; it’s certainly a good thing from a marketing perspective for trusted sites with real visitors to link to you, as it will bring you real visitors that might buy from you.