Making a product worse for consumers and better for the provider by dropping quality is everywhere even in physical world companies. It's not even just a matter of h to e product, but support. Two decades ago, Home Depot had a push to save on labor at the store that led to having nobody there that understood what they were selling, or could help anyone with any project. Lowes ate them alive for a while, and it took them years to regain enough expertise to just not lose in the market straight up. We also see this happening to restaurants all the time.

The issue with someone like Google, or Microsoft, is that they have a larger moat in many products, so the amount of degradation that internal actors will be happy to push in search for profit is much deeper.

Of course Google is disincentivized from fixing the SEO spam problem because those sites are usually full of ads from Google's ad network. Changing the algorithm to favor noncommercial sites with no ads would hurt their revenue, so they don't do it.