It's also possible they they're correct, and the average user of today has much less need for verbatim searches than the average user when the search engine was first designed.
If they break a key feature to MAKE a verbatim search happen with literally two keys pressed, and are apparently not even indexing what they used to anymore, they're dropping the ball. Most people know the quotation trick now and are probably assuming it still works
I tried using verbatim searches to make Google decent for me again, but Google defines "verbatim" rather differently than I do.