Conversely I feel that the experience of searching has been degraded by a lot since 2016/17. My these is that, at this time, online spam increased by an order of magnitude
Right now, I find each tool better at different things.
If I can only describe what I want but don't know key words, LLM are the only solution.
If I need citations, LLMs suck.
Google used to prioritise big comprehensive articles on subjects for desktop users but mobile users just wanted quick answers, so that's what google prioritised as they became the biggest users.
But also, per your point, I think those smaller simpler less comprehensive posts are easier to fake/spam than the larger more compreshensible posts that came before.