Id argue its their job to index the internet, not dictate how people build their webpages to determine the order they are displayed. They want their crawler to be faster and to capture market share/screen time.
https://joyfoodsunshine.com/the-most-amazing-chocolate-chip-...
The second recipe result is Betty Crocker and as you’d expect — recipe at top, steps with photos after.
I personally find more of the former than the latter when looking for specific recipes (Red wine chocolate cake was my most recent search)
They would indeed prefer to be utterly ignored by designers over being gamed to but SEO remains something optimized for like clickbait titles and headlines.
Google is also at a scale where they can improve the quality of everyone's web experience with their scale. It' not so much "their job" as "their obligation."
In that sense, their approach is in some way more equitable than Microsoft's: they're not forcing change upon your system by way of mandatory updates, they're simply saying that if you don't play the same game they play, they're unwilling to do business with you.
If you're free to maintain your server to your standards, why should they not be free to maintain their search service to their standards?
Speed is valuable because it allows users to more quickly digest whether the result is relevant to them.
And then they plug that computer into a global multi-user network and their machine is botnetted and used to harm other users. In that context, people are no longer making simple decisions and accepting the consequences; a tragedy of the commons is instead created.
Your thinking works when computers are isolated from each other. When they're not, it's in the same category as "states require annual vehicle inspections." Because when you're sharing the road with other drivers, you owe it to them that your vehicle is unlikely to undergo catastrophic rapid disassembly.