Did SEO Ruin the Web?

Question

Every time I search for a simple question (e.g. "When is the next season of X out?"), rather than getting a simple answer (e.g. "October 20th, 2019") I'm given a bunch of articles that seem to be artificially inflated just to make the search engine happy that there is enough content/keywords. I feel like publishers don't have the best interest of readers in mind anymore and web pages are just a vehicle to deliver keywords wrapped with useless content, and worst of all, this seems to be directly caused and encouraged by search engines.

lettergram · Accepted Answer

I mean... getting an answer of "October 20th, 2019" is nice, but also that's Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. pulling data from some other website and not getting them the click. So I don't know if you're actually concerned so much about SEO.
Regarding the general concept of SEO, I wrote some of my thoughts about it here: https://austingwalters.com/is-search-solved/
But essentially, Google has perverse incentives as a search provider. They don't want to give you the best answer either. They want you to click ads. SEO has actually very little to do with it in my opinion.