All in all this is just the web moving more in the direction of 'you get what you pay for'. In the olden days you had to almost always pay for advertising to get business (if not word of mouth). Take Yellow Pages as an example if someone had the money to pay for a bigger ad [1] generally they got more calls from yp users. The rest battled it out by trying to name their businesses 'aaaaaplumbing' 'a+plumbing' and so on to get near the top of the listings. Or to get a 'big' sounding phone number xxx-xxx-2000 etc. Google profits when people get frustrated with SEO because they get to sell more ads or at least have the price of those ads bid up. This makes perfect sense hard to believe they couldn't use (hat to say it) AI or better algorithms to figure out what is going on if they wanted to.

[1] Sometimes though you placed a big and a small ad since some people want to deal with a small company and not a big company so you needed both.