The article totally misses the point. Yes, for the digital morons (their turks) google may work perfectly fine. However, for people who actually look for real content google gets worse and worse. All the good material gets far lower ranking than the repetitive low quality medium posts with identical and non-existing content.
Far worse than this is it is destroying the quality of content produced by well meaning creators.
Every review (and almost every site now) has to have the word 'best' wedged in 1000 times and text descriptions of what would be far better communicated by graphs or diagrams. The vocabulary and grammar has to he reduced to duck speak (which becomes more verbose, less clear, harder to read, and more ambiguous). There need to be a hundred repetitions of whatever key words are popular. And there needs to be 50MB of javascript and anti-responsive nonsense for what would more legible, more attractive, more accessible, and actually usable on a phone if it were plain HTML with no styling.
Then you need further 20MB js libraries to progressively or dynamically load 100kB images.
It's not just highlighting terrible content, it's actively destroying good content.
Not sure if the article misses the point then. If Google satisfies your "digital morons" by making it slightly harder for the more advanced users to get the results they want, couldn't that be the right thing to do? For example, over time, Google has been using synonyms more so that often the word you searched for doesn't appear in the page. This works for most people very well, but makes the self proclaimed experts complain
