Welcome to the forum,
A few weeks is still very young, like most things in life nothing comes easy especially when traffic is concerned. It will take time, whether that be through exceptional content, social sharing etc there is more than one way to generate traffic.
Backlinks are still hugely important, its equally as important to make sure your "on-site" optimisation is up to standard. I would highly recommend using a tool such as
SEMrush to audit your site and give you suggestions.
You can sign up for free, add your site as a "project" and run audits and various other functions to help you make sure that your website is setup correctly with the best possibly chances of it ranking natural for the content.
Other things to consider is ensuring you have signed up to
Search console, submitting your sitemap via search console and requesting indexing via "fetch with google bot".
If relevant have a good read up on micro and schema data, make sure your website is using https and has the relevant redirects, make sure its mobile friendly giving it the best possible chances of being found.
Backlinks
While I understand your frustration surrounding building backlinks, you are already thinking about it in the wrong way. Forum posting for links will likely end up giving your brand a poor reputation and will offer very little value in terms of quality of link or relevance.
If you are writing good content and have the time to do so, why not also offer to write for other blogs that are related to your niche, some blogs/sites will allow an author bio you can then have a link back to your site and thus creating a backlink which is relevant and also giving you brand exposure....Win Win?
There are many many ways to build links, it does take effort, it does take time, there is no quick fix that will be sustainable.
Have a good read of these guides too, this will help you get an understanding of the basics and some ideas of what other people are doing and how they do it :
https://backlinko.com/on-page-seo
https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking
Content
if i have decent content is it just a matter of time before i steadily get more traffic or do absolutely have to make sure im pushing the pagerank up?
Quality content without backlinks in theory can still gain traffic and exposure, good internal linking, On-page SEO, exceptional content written on a regular basis can soon get attention from other sources of traffic. If you are limited in ability or time to work on external SEO factors, then yes focus that time on creating a great resource, great content and share it where possible.
Don't get disillusioned with time scales though, look at months and years rather than weeks. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Good luck.
