It's not just you. I find myself increasingly encapsulating words in my queries with quotes because Google outright ignores relevant words in my searches. In some cases it has even lead to queries looking like this:
"us" "ambassador" "germany"
"us" "ambassador" "germany"
My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google.
For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.
From memory I do recall the +/- and "" operator being overriden if there was a "popular" search query that contained broader results than my specific query.
Specifically for the "" operator was that the query would drop "" so instead of showing x results which must include that expression it would show broader results as if the expression was not contained in "".
Google search has been getting increasingly worse for me over the last five years or so. In terms of the quality of search results, it has no edge over DDG.
With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.
Here are some results for Taylor Swift instead: