Yet, it's easier than ever to build a website of your own. The web is still out there, but Google can't find it. I think Google's incentives no longer align with my own so I am increasingly de-Googling my life.
It might crawl it, but without tons of "SEO" it will never show it on any results page. "Google can't find it" is shorthand for "Google is useless for finding it".
Exactly. The web is full of niche, high quality websites that aren't playing the SEO game. Google buries these so deep in the results (or chooses not to index them) that they effectively don't exist.