Those claims mainly come from people in schools, universities, youth orgs and companies. So the ones who should know it best I would think, as they work with young people all the time. This does not seem to be a particular hyper specific bubble. Of course, complaints about youth are not new, the young people are by nature lacking experience and knowledge, that's a given, and so are complaints about those lacks. But lately, there is a new type of complaints, which is about technology and specifically computers. This is atypically, as for the last decades, young people usually had the benefit of being more competent with new technologies, as they grew up with them. This was a defining difference between the generations for a long time. And now this seems to disappear, or at least change.
And after thinking about, it makes sense. Technology today has reached a plateau of quality and comfort, has removed the struggles of the past, and is now cheap and widely used in society. That's very different from the previous decades, where tech was an uphill-battle, where computers were expensive and only used by those who had demand for it. Tech today has saturated society, and this also changed perception.
Now more people can evaluate the actual ability of people. And old people today have legit reasons to learn and use technology. And the most notable change is: the old people today, are the middle-aged and young people from decades ago, meaning they are the ones who had already in the past reasons to learn technologies. So comparing old with young today in those aspects, is very different from 20, 30 years ago. And it seems, the young people today have finally lost their benefit of early access to technology, and now they compete again with experience and knowledge.
So regarding Googles search this means, maybe the youth is just lacking good google-fu, which older users with more experience have. Or they generally have a difference stance on how the search should work, because they have no deeper understanding on what the Search is, what it should deliver and can deliver, and what not. Some of the comments here go very strong in that direction, that people have a very different approach on what they expect from Google. So again, it's a difference in perception.