Internet searches in many categories have always been useless. Searching for a restaurant or car insurance has never ever returned anything useful on any search engine, ever. it's not as though google used to have incredibly relevant results for a search term like "cheapest car insurance" and now it's been replaced by ads. The only thing a search like that has ever gotten you is the websites of the insurance companies who are well established brands.
The categories where google is pushing a lot of ads or supplementary features like knowledge graph are the categories where organic results are not a good experience. 9 times out of 10, when i search for something on google i get a traditional SERP with little to no advertising. If you're searching for something that doesn't necessarily lend itself to a web search, google should be trying to find some way to make that useful to somebody, whether that is a feature that gives you better results or an admission that their organic results for that query are useless, so here have some ads instead.
In regards to your first paragraph, you are completely right because the product has always not been the consumer of the search.
I dont if it would be possible for a subscription based search service to exist, but as long as they are selling to advertisers and not to the people there is very little incentive for this to change imo.
The categories where google is pushing a lot of ads or supplementary features like knowledge graph are the categories where organic results are not a good experience. 9 times out of 10, when i search for something on google i get a traditional SERP with little to no advertising. If you're searching for something that doesn't necessarily lend itself to a web search, google should be trying to find some way to make that useful to somebody, whether that is a feature that gives you better results or an admission that their organic results for that query are useless, so here have some ads instead.