[zozbot123]

> It's really really hard to rank post 2014 era just because you want it to work.

You can blame grey-hat and black-hat SEO for that. It's also why the quality of Google Search more generally has tanked, especially for non-trivial searches: it seems that Google is desperately trying to always play it safe and give zero incentive to potential spammers, even if this screws some users over in the short term. Bing and DDG are a lot better these days if you're looking for something highly specific, weird or uncommon, while Google is surprisingly fine for common, even trivial/mindless searches.