The point is that Google frequently adds another level of incorrectness, that may not be identifiable without checking the source. This is pretty common on Wikipedia, and when people link to things in discussion forums, as well.

And anything Google does, is done at vast scale, which makes me, at least, think it might be substantially affecting society.

But that's the responsibility of that website. Of course it's bad if Google lists a site with wrong information as the first hit, but I think it's worse when Google blindly copies that false info and lists it as their own zero-click result. By doing that, Google itself takes responsibility for the information.

Although sometimes the site is actually correct and Google still gets it wrong by copying the info incorrectly or losing some context or qualifiers.

I loved zero-click results back when DucfDuckGo first introduced them, but I'm less enthusiastic about Google's implementation of them.

sometimes the blurb just has an answer to a different question. Websites are curated, unless its spam.

> Websites are curated, unless its spam.

Yes, but even when they are curated the curators are usually unreliable and sometimes malicious.

snippets are just a reflection of that. how is google faring better in that respect?

Those are sites google chooses are correct.