That's an excellent point for searches on new things. But for things that had a lot of existing content, I also find them more and more drowned out.

I think the reason is that Google rewards following it's instructions for mobile, security, etc, and existing quality content is often kept online merely as a donation to the public. Having the incentives of a spammer and following through on every rumored 2% rank improvement is almost a requirement to get near the top results.

I really hope someone working on Google's search algs thinks about this. So, so many incredible sources of information are found on un-optimized pages.

I'd go so far as to say that an optimized page is often an indicia of low quality / unoriginal content.

Was it ever easier to monetize? AFAIR good content was always free. If content is created only out of monetary incentive it's rarely good.

Yeah, fair point.