I don't think that "Google has it coming" for this. In fact I think they support the open web much more than competing alternatives (Facebook, etc) who want to create walled gardens that require auth (identity). It's up to content providers if they want to completely target SEO and create poor quality content, and some are constantly gaming the system. What Google is doing is looking for more meta content, which is a very beneficial for everyone. meta keywords didn't work, and SEO goes beyond them to provide precise information about a site's content. Anyone can use SEO techniques for good and bad, it's by no means proprietary.

It's the general Web that didn't keep up and provide better solutions for quality and precise content, solving problems like "This blog is not about avocados" or links in a sidebar about avocados that lead search results for avocados to that page. Microformats and other approaches were suggested, but they were basically too complicated and tools didn't support them.

Where Google has fallen down is not providing more search/browsing tools to allow individuals to tune sites and keywords. There are many obvious opportunities in Google search, news, etc that would make the experience amazing compared to the picking-through-the-repetitive-garbage we see today. I suspect there is a battle between their tech and marketing about this, and I also think Google's ML team are using our garbage-picking to tune their algorithms rather than letting people just choose what they want to see. That is disgraceful, and they won't change it until there is competition which makes me lose a lot of respect for Google, but I don't blame SEO directly for this and since SEO is based on standards anyone could use their own "Web reader" to add a layer of filtering without special agreements, unlike content by companies that try to create walled gardens.

edit: comment about "web reader."