Within engineering, there is this weird dominant culture that fresher information is more likely to be accurate.

Sometimes, that's right, because a lot of tech changes so quickly that a three year old article about is now hopelessly out of date since v5 deprecated v3 syntax.

For a lot of other articles, I'd rather read an authoritative, well-written article that was published 40 years ago. Nothing material has changed in the intervening period, so it doesn't matter.

Google just doesn't seem to know when I value quality over freshness, so it defaults to the latter most of the time.