Basically, no one we see is representative of the galactic norm.
And yet a lot of the time the community treats them like they are. Han is, even before he meets Obi-Wan and Luke, considered one of the best smugglers in the galaxy. His rolodex is a whose who of the galaxies criminal element and organizations. He was personally smuggling spice for Jabba by the ship load. Jabba the Hutt, one of the five or so most powerful crime lords in the galaxy, was *personally* hiring Han for jobs.
So yes, Han can show up on a planet and be meeting face to face with the biggest criminals on the planet in a few hours or days. Not just because he knows who to talk to but because everyone who is anyone in the underworld knows who he is and his skills are both useful and proven. The mere fact that Han Solo came to that person for something is a massive reputation boost to them. The favors game? Well Han can provide an introduction to basically anyone who is anyone in the underworld.
Honestly I feel Han being a big shot is really a fuck up on the part of writers who misunderstood the character as presented in A New Hope.
This is a guy who was clearly blowing smoke out of his ass when he talked about doing the Kessle Run in "parsecs" to impress random yokel Luke Skywalker and an old dude from the desert to get paid roughly in the zone of the price of a random kid's space-truck or, being very generous to fanon, maybe the price of his "farm" of a few humidity traps selling water to the port. And there's no indications they even could have used the farm, much less did right after the Imperials shot the place up, or had any access to significant credit.
Han Solo was a space truck driver or real world merchant ship captain tier dude who talked a big game to a naive kid who had not gone to space college. Several sets of writers were taken in by his stitch and decided "oh wow, he and his crew are totally cool put together spacemen!"
Any trip where the price of what, a luxury car being pretty generous, is worth it to the guy to fly the entire ship, counting all the fixed costs of space craft ownership, on a journey lasting several days, is really suggesting he's scrapping by and really freaking cash poor even if I'd say he's still in the galactic one percent the idea that Luke could pay him without being mega-rich himself kind of makes all the "Han was the absolute top tier of criminals at the time" pretty ridiculous IMO.
Note this is not an argument against Han having a really cool back story, just an argument against him and associated characters being portrayed as the best and most famous criminals in the galaxy. I think that misses a lot of the aesthetics of Star Wars as a space western and Used Future to portray Han and, honestly, Jabba as these galactic tier bigshots instead of a random scoundrel and a crazy dude squatting in a castle running drugs.
This runs against a lot of media, but really, if we're saying we can't discount big elements of Star Wars media as stupid, what are we even doing?