Why, though? There is an arbitrary ranking system that seems increasingly independent of what I actually searched for. Google had created a game where the winner isn't necessarily relevant or at all useful. It's inevitable that spammers will play that game.
A bit of it is probably that.
Outright ignoring my queries: +, doublequotes, "verbatim" and all takes more than SEO tactics, it takes someone inside Google, either malicious or more probably incompetent on the inside.
Or more probably: someone was so busy trying to use AI in searches that no they haven't had time the last ten years to consider if it was smart.
Or maybe Google started applying "We know better than the users", the driving principle behind their software and libraries, to their search.
It seems to me that the techniques used to spam Google's index work just as well on Bing's index.
It seems DDG is worse at finding the more authoritative sites about a subject compared to Google.
You search for a very specific thing and all the results are big sites that have said something that contains two of the 6 words you search for in a completely generic article that helps you none.
My favorite is when your query contains a word that is the very essence of what you search for and google chooses to display results without it so you have to do extra click "yes I actually want to search for what I said I want to search for".