I think the interesting question is this: why is this happening? There’s always been a battle between Google and SEO black hats, but I can’t remember the last time it got this bad. Is Google just temporarily losing, or have they lost the will to fix this at all?
I always observe what tools trades carry when they work on my properties, and chat with them over the drinks and snacks I offer them, on what they like and don't like. That figures heavily into my decisions.
Google's main purpose these days for me is non-mainstream, far niche searches. I've taken to looking into deploying my own ArchiveBox to just store my own curated search results that I like. When I initially noticed the SEO spam around 20 years ago, I began to prepare for it by manually saving into text files the page links off of search results that I used, and that has helped me a lot. Ironically, I'm building my own personal Yahoo Directory. I don't see any solution on the horizon to SEO pollution getting better, so I want to scale up my solution.
Cannot reproduce.