This is like the first thing I research for. I usually prepend reddit because somethings I search things like:

"reddit software X vs __________"

because the alternative is not semantically correct

"software X vs reddit"

google is smart enough to know I really meant "site:reddit.com software X vs _________"

The same is true for youtube, if you go to the video's section sometimes you don't get youtube results on first listing. Just prepend "youtube"

I also do this very frequently.

Search for reddit itself isn’t great but Google usually surfaces more popular threads from reddit which have valuable and ranked comments on any topic.

This is what I do as well. The upvotes, downvotes and comments mean I trust threads with a lot of comments because I know the top voted comment has had some critical evaluation. The top Google result tends to only be authored by one entity and you don't see critical comments about it.

And to think they had a special 'discussions' search that would search forums and groups.

Adding !r to the end of a Duck Duck Go search does the same thing.

I started to question google, when I found myself doing this alot

also, you can use site:reddit.com to get results only from reddit domain