Everyone in SEO treats Google like a god. If you have a somewhat stable + successful project, you're sacrificing things to Google (let's all adopt AMP, yes, it's so great! let's all do CWV and say we believe in user experience!) and praise Google each day and avoid anything that you've heard might displease Google for fear of Google sending down lightning and turning your projects to ashes. If you don't have one of those golden geese, you must be more nimble and make sure that the lightning only strikes where you've been yesterday and doesn't catch up with you.
The blackhat part is much more stressful (I've had clients get super depressed when their old tricks no longer worked and they burned site after site after site and nothing worked for months), and everyone I know that did that has transitioned to whitehat as soon as an opportunity presented itself and gotten rid of all the blackhat stuff to not have their main sites get caught in a penalty.
I have no idea how ML generated content will change all that, but Expertise, Authority and Trust (=EAT) is what everybody has been worried about for the past year, and whether Google will believe them that they're experts and should be trusted.
Of course, the "how exactly is it implemented", "what weight does this factor have", "can I exploit how it works" etc is another story, but if you started building a search engine and wrote down your ideas about ranking and approaches to deal with some manipulation attempt etc, I'm sure you'd come up with a lot of the same things.
what are some suggestions you make that your clients don't follow?
They vastly over-estimate Google's abilities to identify patterns ("we use similar wording on other sites, that's a pattern" for wording that everyone uses, like talking about the beach distance on a hotel review, or just using bootstrap) and are like "I don't understand, but I trust you so I'll consider this okay ... for now". If some ranking drops, they're always eager to roll back any changes that were done, even if they didn't affect the frontend ("who knows how Google works").
At the same time, while they want to avoid patterns to connect their sites, they run all their sites in the same search console and analytics account.
Most of them pick up very few technical things and transition from Product Management into SEO by learning how to run reports and what blogs to read for instructions. Introducing the DOM inspector is something I'm often blowing minds with, same with viewing request in the network console ("you mean I don't need the redirect tester 3000 any more?")
I've only once worked for clients that had someone doing SEO who was deep into technical SEO and had all kinds of automation set up and roughly understood how HTTP works, the differences between server and client etc.
Much of it is quasi-religious, I've often jokingly suggested trying to sacrifice a chicken. I'm not sure everybody laughed and never gave it some serious thoughts.
- nobody in the West cares about Yandex SERPs and Yandex isn't Google, so you can't easily transfer the factors
- Your favorite SERPs aren't being overtaken by SEO garbage because they're not big/profitable enough to catch attention. It's really more of a dark forest thing in SEO, and search volume is how you detect prey. SEOs don't care about things they cannot make a lot of money from.
- SEOs aren't that technical. They employ some technical people (me for instance), but they don't listen to technical people, they care about links links links links, headlines, title, description, microdata (for fancier Google SERP display because having a fancy display can make rank 2 work just as well as rank 1) and keywords. Some do keyword-related stuff like WDF*IDF, but it's more of a ritual where they throw text into different tools and wait for all lamps to turn green. They're really not that sophisticated. Source: am working for large affiliates with millions of visits per month.