It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?
Again, then why are people using Google more than ever?
I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.
Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing.
For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead.
That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely.
This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.
The policy described in my link is literally about making each user search more to get the results they want in order to drive more ad revenue. That would create more searches and a less good user experience.
You might want to let Google know that, because the number of searches on Google appears to continue to be growing massively:
https://searchengineland.com/google-5-trillion-searches-per-...
Those numbers look like the exact opposite of dead or dying to me. As does Google's growing stock price over the same time period.