The holy pantheon of novelists is not as well-settled as that of composers because music is more accessible across language divides, less expensive, and because more people (wrongly, IMO) trust themselves to evaluate a novel than trust themselves to evaluate music. This leads to people in different languages reading and advocating different authors, but listening to and advocating the same composers.
I'd specified novelists because literary figures is far too broad, but even in the narrower field Luo Guanzhong, Murasaki Shikibu, Charlotte Bronte, Austen, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Woolf, Garcia Marquez, Hemingway, and Dostoyevsky all have pretty good arguments for being ranked above Dickens.
Everything you say in your first paragraph is very true.
As for your second, of those I'm familiar with I think I could make a case for Dickens over most of them.
Tolstoy I do agree with. I think he wrote two towering literary masterpieces that stand alongside the best of Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, Homer, Virgil, and
insert whatever pillars of literature here. War & Peace especially feels like it contains the whole universe in its pages. It's one novel I almost regretted finishing because I didn't want to leave its world and characters.
Bronte, Austen, Woolf, and Marquez all wrote masterpieces, but relatively few of them compared to Dickens. Of those I'm particularly fond of Austen and I think that given her limited sphere of subject matter she perfected her unique style of subtle irony, characterization, perspective, and social commentary. However, her novels do lack the breadth of Dickens and I don't find they have more depth. Perhaps more nuance, more detail in their small moments, but that's it. The one thing I will say about Austen is that I don't know of another author who is appreciated for such completely different reasons by casual readers (whoread her irony as straight romanticism) and critics. To this list I would've added George Elliot, whom I actually think is their equal if not superior.
Hemingway I've never been super impressed with. I get why his style was so unique and influential and while I don't think his stories were bad or poorly written they haven't moved me much. I probably would've replaced him with Melville or Faulkner.
Dostoyevsky I'm ambivalent about. At times he seems more a failed, shallow philosopher than a novelist, and even when he is focusing on narrative and characters I often can't shake the feeling his characters and events are mere mouthpieces for whatever themes he wants to talk about. Tolstoy shares some of Dosto's overt philosophizing, but Tolstoy has sense enough to keep it completely separate from the novel itself and not let it overtly infect his narrative (it's always in the background, but it's much more subtle). Dosto could write superbly when he wanted to as with much of The Brothers Karamazov, but I generally find him overrated, particularly by youngsters who are ready for literature with an overt philosophical edge.
To me, the argument for Dickens over all (or most) of these authors is the depth of his oeuvre. Many of these authors wrote maybe a handful of top-tier works. Dickens did that too: Bleak House, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend... but then Dickens also wrote many more excellent novels beside that: Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, A Christmas Carroll... and even his lesser works tend to be (at least) very enjoyable.
