For me, and I imagine many people in the world, Google Search has gotten more useful in recent years. The information I'm looking for is presented in the first screen, or just a few clicks away.
Finding a particular website about a topic isn't the main use case; it's to find a snippet of information, like who played some character on a TV show or whatever.
Publishers certainly don't like it, but it works well for users.
Google's web search is less useful today because it puts fingers on the scale of the algorithm, not because the web is worse.