How much of that is based on general incompetence, SEO gaming, growing complexity of searches or manipulation (e.g. filtering "disinformation")? Or something else.
This makes it basically unusable for anything that isn't a technical question, for which it is still reasonably good if you restrict to sites where it will likely get a reasonable answer.
If special interest groups aligned with google have a position on what you're searching though, it will simply be spammed outright and any evidence to the contrary either concealed or "fact checks" which consist of minor modifications on the core underlying fact in question spiked with something that is obviously false so that the fact check can say "false" whilst actually the underlying fact in question is not at all false. Even when those special interest groups are right, google is still useless because it will give you such a slanted view of the territory you will be utterly clueless as to what other sides of the debate even exist as anything more than silly strawmen. Most questions in this class people would be better served by just petitioning Blackrock and similar directly and asking them what they should think.
For commercial stuff it's almost as bad, I find myself having to figure out the underlying financial realities of the industry that produces x, then getting a summary of the market space by volume and associated data, then speculating on stuff that might exist within that market space that might be nice in light of whatever flaws afflict the market space in question, and maybe if I get lucky I'll find something through the reams and reams of valueless SEO optimised pop-up spewing complete and utter bullshit desperately attempting to capitalise on my assumed stupidity with their cookie cutter a-b tested "sales pitches". Most of the time I end up just going to alibaba or similar, finding vendors shipping actual large units with decent reviews, and then working backwards from there to what I'm looking for.
Watching google fall from something amazing to probably-worse-than-microsoft-all-things-considered tier was quite the eye opener.
Search, "what hotel to stay in san francisco soma". You'll see that every single result above the fold is an Ad.
In fact it doesn't even give me a single useful piece of information. #1 result is a link to expedia. #2 is to hotels.com, #3 to the trip advisor. Scroll down Google Hotels widget. Then on the 3rd browser viewpoint page I get actual query results.
When weird search results get posted on HN, they're sometimes fixed within minutes. I wouldn't doubt that the search term was "fixed" by someone reading HN.
It's less about paid placement taking priority (as in intentionally degrading results) but more that there's no incentive to spend money improving organic search results where at best it'll do nothing and at worst decrease the profitability of paid results (people are less likely to click on them if the organic results are good), not to mention that crap organic results also benefit Google as these websites often have Google Ads or Analytics.