Like you, I thought typing questions into Google was wrong for a long time. The times have changed; this is how most people interact with Google, and it really does convey intent to the system better now that we have sufficiently powerful NLP.
That’s okay if your goal is to get an answer to a straightforward question. If, however, your goal is to research a topic, or to find sources for something, or any other scenario where your aim is to read actual web pages, then you want web search, not AI answers. These are two different use cases.
I absolutely agree that it handles natural language questions much better now than when I started using search engines in the late 1990s - in fact it's optimized for this task now, meeting demand where it's at - but a direct answer to a question is often not what I want. For example, I often want to find a page that I remember reading in the past, so that I can re-read or cite it. Or I want more reading material to get a deeper, more nuanced understanding of some topic; things that will provide more context around answers or lead me to generating new questions.