This heavily aligns with my experiences over the past few years.

Where Google once used to return exact or close results for very specific or niche searches, I feel like it struggles to even land in the same ballpark of results. I've been asking myself whether the results have always been this bad more and more over the last year and a half thinking I've been taking crazy pills. Unfortunately, the current competitors still perform even worse for the same queries so it's not like there's enough of a reason to default elsewhere (yet, I hope).