Can I defend Google here?

What are they supposed to do? The "Internet" as an information resource is dead. All new topical information has moved to walled gardens such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Reddit etc, and mobile apps. The open websites such as Wikipedia, StackOverflow etc dominate everything else. Websites are legacy objects which no-one visits anymore, and they have therefore raced to the bottom to earn scraps of revenue. This is a structural problem that Google cannot fix. Google itself is doomed on the long-term unless it can index new relevant content.