Yeah, the results are absolute SEO garbage far too frequently. However, I'm not sure if this is Google "losing" to SEO ppl, or short-sighted greedy behaviour by Google ads ppl. It certainly could be the greedy case - SEO garbage pages tend to be packed full of Google Display ads, so Google gets paid by advertisers whenever you load them. If they are favouring pages with Google Display ads (or favouring domains that spend a lot of Google Search ads in "organic" results), then that'd hurt the results a lot.
Example of terrible SEO results - I saw an interesting magic trick on Reddit, and someone in the comments mentioned they did it using "Key BDM Scissors". I tried searching all sorts of different things along the lines of "how do Key BDM Scissors work", but literally every single result was just online stores selling the scissors, with the word-for-word exact same blurb on each page. No matter how I tweaked the query, the results were identical, and in no way explained how the trick scissors worked. Useless.
Example of terrible SEO results - I saw an interesting magic trick on Reddit, and someone in the comments mentioned they did it using "Key BDM Scissors". I tried searching all sorts of different things along the lines of "how do Key BDM Scissors work", but literally every single result was just online stores selling the scissors, with the word-for-word exact same blurb on each page. No matter how I tweaked the query, the results were identical, and in no way explained how the trick scissors worked. Useless.