You’re saying that user preference shifted, but in reality, Google’s preference shifted. That, to me, is the problem highlighted by this story and others.
Google shifts their algorithm also in response to people gaming it. Affiliate websites (such as this one) have been gaming the SEO system with AI/India-written articles for a long time. It seems the dude is honest and writes the content himself, but it is obviously nearly impossible to tell them apart, so they all get the chop. Sucks for him, but perhaps we're all better off.
I agree with this in concept, but it has been a bitter pill to see my site overtaken by scraper/outsourced content that I consider to be pure spam. Google doesn't always get it right (regardless of my own situation).
I'd feel the same. I manage a SEO-driven website too and know the struggle. Sadly, some business practices go out of style. Good luck with this and your future endeavours!
I'm saying both user preferences and search algorithms change. Even absent an algorithm change, it's not reasonable to expect search traffic to stay high over time. A drop in search traffic is always a potential, and one that exists regardless of any change in the search engine.
And it's also unclear whether algorithm changes - "Google's preference" as you put it - is a problem. Unchanging algorithms would likely trend towards a small set of incumbents collecting most search results. A shifting search algorithm landscape means users are more likely to see results that were previously buried. This story highlights one loser of this change, but not all the aspiring websites that would be eager to get even half of goodcheapandfast's traffic. These search results went somewhere. One site's lost traffic is another site's opportunity. Algorithm updates changing things up is not altogether an undesirable factor in a search engine.
Changing algorithms also favor a small set of incumbents. The stock of my former employer is up more than 2,000% in the last 5 years. That's amazing growth for any publisher and it's largely based on SEO.