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It seems so, but I don't know that all browsers map quality values to order of preference in the same way.

I don't know about expressing ties. If there really is a tie and the client is just as happy to receive either language of equal Q, then it doesn't matter to the client that one is consistently preferred over another. Perhaps it could matter to the server if e.g. the client indicated that "en" and "zh" are tied, but the "en" content can be served in fewer bytes than it can serve the "zh" content, but it seems like such a niche use case.

edit: RFC 9110 offers an explanation: "Note that some recipients treat the order in which language tags are listed as an indication of descending priority, particularly for tags that are assigned equal quality values (no value is the same as q=1). However, this behavior cannot be relied upon. For consistency and to maximize interoperability, many user agents assign each language tag a unique quality value while also listing them in order of decreasing quality."

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re: ties, often a page has "main" language(s) with more content, and translated version with just the basics. If you speak both you probably want the former. Actually for me often I need to go to the German version of a site rather than English to get what I'm looking for, contra my stated preferences... Localisation is a mess.
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That's a good point. I suppose that the quality of the translation could also be a factor. If for example I only slightly prefer my native language over English, the website could (theoretically) spare me the poorly machine translated page in my native language over the original page in English. Multiply the client's quality assessment of the relative degradation in quality given language options with the server's quality assessment of the localizations on offer and serve the content with the highest score.

Fun anecdote: I remember seeing a screenshot of a website selling a scented candle called "basic bitch", which was machine translated so that the idiomatic meaning was entirely lost. So the translation ended up meaning something like "foundational female dog".

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