Instead of fixing the spam they are instead encouraging companies to spend more and more time on SEO and coming up with their own shenanigans like better ranking for using AMP (defunct now).
People who generally make great content (think a researcher or a great software maker) can't compete with billion dollar companies like Canva, Shutterstock and Pinterest who spend millions of dollars on SEO and have dedicated SEO employees who spend all day sending outreach emails and doing experiments. Henceforth the good content never even sees the light of the day; drowned by all this "SEO" optimized content.
FWIW i still believe it's the job of the search engine to find great relevant content and show it to the user instead of the other way round. Though I know it's much easier said than done.