The "magic box" is really just summarizing the top X results, which have been ranked by AI for many years. Everyone has been "blindly trusting" all that for a good while now.
This is like a book publisher refusing to sell books to schools without including spark notes on the inside cover.
Right now it's pretty bad, so Google forcing it on people is quite bad.
It's almost certainly not going to be good enough by the time they start enforcing this.
That's true regardless of whether it gets good or not.
> And partly because they know many of the screamers will go quiet when it gets good enough; all they have to do is ignore them
That depends on how long it takes and whether they keep spending the same amount of money per query.