Absolutely opposite of that in my experience. Search for anything technical and Google gives me pages selling programming courses, or it just omits the technical part of the query(like the name of the class) and serves pages upon pages of generic results that have absolutely nothing to do with what I'm searching for. It used to be the top engine for programming-related searches, now it's easily the worst.

Its possible that the VPN I am typically on changes my results from yours, as my VPN is quite specific to a research institution, and it is known how google curates results based on that information.

Has to be pretty niche for that still to be the case in my experience. If I search for help on, say, a bit of python syntax I get endless low quality webpages from Google.

Maybe they get the most of their user feedback from their own engineers.