I also grew up at a time where observing actual signal and seeing the difference between "the good stuff" and "marketing woo" didn't even require half of it. I also spend a lot of time sweating how to leave behind a learnable system as good as the one I grew up with and getting frustrated because younger people and other adults can't get consistent replicable results because every damn search provider has more "personalization hooks" or agenda driven weight functions to result display that search queries for the neophyte are many times the length of ones not even a decade or so old; with better results getting hidden under the stuff that someone has a fiscal interest in getting SEO'd to the top.
The Internet does have a problem if we can't rear Internet savvy youth, which face it, the majority of parents can't because they aren't.
And no. The entire practice of SEO basically poisons the well for everyone. Any information under that type of evolutionary pressure is going to become garbage to anyone but someone who is versed in the more arcane aspects of searching, which is not the bloody thing I'm looking to perpetuate, justify or otherwise make more tenable.
So you're left with either curation, building your own search index you never share with any significant number of people or you capitulate to the market and the perverse regulations and perception management from <insert government here> that do nothing but perception manage anyone unaware of what is going on.
We live in a digital world separated from the actually extant one by multiple layers of entrenched players tweaking levers to determine what we do and don't see.
That ain't cool. We can't fix problems no one can see and come to a consensus on.