Your feeling is confirmed by real-world results. Google has consistently improved the quality of its models, and we've seen BIG jumps in the output of AI results.
That's positive, but the tradeoff is that Google is now focusing mainly on AI search (RAG) instead of traditional search results.
One of the main problems of RAG, in my opinion? The system focuses on a few trusted sources and generates content based on the retrieved data.
Where are the small publishers? Almost inexistant. But going back to your Stackoverflow example, there are other issues, such as giving too much weight to old/outdated answers. I don't know if that's also something you noticed?