Oh they absolutely do, and thank goodness. What turns out to be the most useful page often contains a synonym instead, which an exact query would have missed.

But I've never seen Google return results that don't have anything to do with my search terms at all. Is that a problem you've had? Do you have an example query?

The only bad searches I get are when a word/term has multiple meanings and the more popular one crowds out what I'm actually looking for... but then I just add terms to narrow it down and it fixes it.

I don't take issue with spellcheck or even synonym suggestions, FWIW. It's that the results which include/are relevant to specifically requested terms appear below results that don't/aren't, sometimes way below. It hasn't always been this way but I can't pinpoint when results started getting worse.

If you put all terms in quotes, Google generally won't ignore anything. It will tell you it couldn't find any results though, quite frequently.

I don't care about having the right words in the right place if the results have what I'm searching for.

But again, no example provided.