Well, some things are (reverse image search, ease of accessing 'Cached' pages -- now I have to go to archive.org Wayback, etc), but forum search has always been bad.
Long before Reddit was big, USENET/DejaNews and forum software like PHPbb/UBB ruled supreme (and before Markdown there was UBB Code). Google, despite owning DejaNews, did not often surface links into USENET content, and a lot of forums, for whatever reason, were not indexed by Google. For example, I used to spend a lot of time reading the latest on PC/3D Hardware stuff on Beyond3D, Overclockers, Rage3D, etc and I almost always had either use site specific search (dejanews.com or say, PHP BB's built in local search), or I had to add site:beyond3d.com for example.
And is a large amount of confirmation bias going on in these Google threads that appear. Some people make assumptions that their search patterns are representative of the billions of searchers ("argh, I searched for pytorch k-means and a GitHub wrapper site appeared!") and that their experience is a representative sample, while others focus only on what has gotten worse, and not what has gotten better.
What's clearly gotten worse is webspam. But while it has degraded the Googlee experience, it's not clear any of the other search engines are any better at filtering it out, except by luck because perhaps they don't crawl as many sites as often.