While I feel that Google has become worse in last couple of years, I'm pretty sure it is still better now when 15 years ago. Maybe it is just some kind of nostalgia?
instead of discussion forums and Q&A sites, everyone's on facebook/twitter/discord/slack/snapchat/tiktok/etc... none of that is really very google friendly
online marketing and SEO is a much larger industry now, so with less (by % of total) searchable content generated by people (which is on social media) a lot of the high-ranking content that appears in search is highly optimized marketing
then you have other kind of weird things like... half of all internet traffic being bots