You are correct!
There's quite a drastic swing of people that say they're all wrong and those that say they're slightly wrong. They usually update them a few times a year, but like Meza said, they don't really fix them as they're trying to achieve a particular result by skewing the ratings to achieve it.
I'm not sure how exactly it works with the licencing in terms of editing. Normally i'd have said there'd be something in the licence that means you can't manually edit lineups, stats, team performance, etc as the teams would say it infringes on image rights or whatever (particularly in the first season of MyTeam/Career) ... but you can now literally do all those things in F1Manager so there has to be some degree of flexibility in the licensing. It's possible they have different parameters of flexibility in the respective licences but "the licence doesn't allow it" is a flakier argument than it used to be.
Regardless, you are correct that they'll update the ratings probably a few weeks after game release and we get to criticise this all again. Woo!