[vgeek]

From a UX perspective, your site is perfectly fine. From an SEO perspective, though, the brand/category pages don't have enough content (in Google's opinion) to be uniquely relevant. Even though a user would find the faceting/filtering functionality highly useful, Google uses things like word count, TF-IDF and topic relevancy as signals (albeit easily gamed) to surface "relevant" pages. This is why recipe sites all have 500+ word intros before each recipe and even more on category pages.

Backlinks also matter, for both domain and page authority. You are competing with 20+year old domains from large companies-- why should you (or any new site) get ranked before dickssportinggoods.com who have top tier backlinks (graph network, implies trustworthiness) from sites like Espn.com? Google likely uses CrUX data for ranking (because 2023 backlinking is vastly different than 2012), so high engagement from users is likely a KPI to focus on, in addition to backlinks (both branded and inclusive of terms/pages you want to rank for).

[hedora]

You make it sound really easy to build a search engine that would greatly outperform google:

Have its ranking algorithms do the opposite of all the things you just said!

[vgeek]

There are obviously hundreds of other factors (with different weights), with dozens/hundreds of tests at any given time, but those few factors are what have remained relatively consistent over time. That is partially why Google's results are so bad. It is only a matter of time for people to figure put what matters and then optimize against it. What is best for the user may not be the best for Google, sites or advertisers. Unfortunately, many times the best content isn't visible, because people capable of marketing have a leg up versus those who just want to provide utility.