It's more that they seem unwillingly to admit that purely automated methods don't achieve optimal results when they're being fought by equally automated scams. They could bump their overall ranking quality significantly by blacklisting known bad-actors that scrape real sites and put up hollow shells of barely edited, machine-munged plagiarism, yet do not.

And that’s fine. PageRank is/was a genius idea that should still be used today. But they need to do more. When I search something and half the results are Markov Chain like blogspam full of ads, I have to wonder where the effort is going into those things (definitely not AdSense /s).

If anyone can combat it, Google can. It doesn't seem that hard to me to assign low (or negative) weight to links that suddenly appear on a page that hasn't otherwise changed in years, for example. Or links to the same site on pages that otherwise have nothing to do with each other in terms of content/subject. I'm sure it's harder than that, but all those engineers ought to be earning their six figure salaries.