To be fair, this is probably more Google not caring rather than any improvement in SEO gaming. Kagi doesn't suffer from the SEO spam like Google does, and if a small company can do it surely Google could if they wanted to.

Kagi can do it because of the fact that they're a small company, not despite it.

I doubt it has anything to do with company size. Most likely it's due to what drives their products. In the case of Google, overall it's how many ads they sell, and if improving search quality doesn't lead to more ads, then there is little incentive to do it.

For Kagi, they get revenue from customers paying for quality, so there is direct incentive to produce high quality search results.

Kagi isn't a target for SEO tactics. If they became as popular as Google, SEO manipulators would find ways to improve their position on Kagi.

A few times I have googled a company name directly and the first few results were SEO snipes.

#1 cause in the decline of Google maybe. https://search.marginalia.nu/ seems to manage though, so maybe Google just doesn't care.

It's mostly due to incentives. The most effective way to go after search engine spam is to aim for what the search engine spammers are after, which is mostly ad impressions. If you get rid of the ads, you get rid of the search engine spam. Of course, that would be directly hitting Google's bottom line, and is never going to happen[1]

The other factor is of course that they are very big, and get directly targeted in a way I'm not.

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a

Though you'd think something like page-rank would not be attracted to some random pages that are only linked to from the same domain.

Stop blaming SEO and start blaming Google.

Ultimately they're responsible for creating the incentives that are killing the web.