I just don't think this is true. I just think Google has become actually bad at search, and there is no malice.

The problem with SEO spam was always there (remember expert sex change?) but they beat it before... but now it became bad again.

But they have monopoly anyway (bing is even worse for actually searching, ddg is just bing, brave search sucks) so they don't really care. What are you gonna do, use Ask.com?