Ask HN: Is Google becoming useless as a search engine, or is it just me?

I do not disagree with anything you're asserting here. Google is a mess of gamed results most of the time. The internet in many places has become a series of sites searching for eyes to get ad dollars. The only thing I think I'd question is your claim of being a "power user." A power user would be able to construct queries that removed (or at least lessened) the gamed results.

"Outside of Stackoverflow results (which, thankfully, are at the top of the page), most articles are written for a broad, beginner audience (like a React article starting with a tutorial on installing React)."

This is the result of a confluence of two issues that plague (yes, plague) our industry: the disinterest/dismissive attitude towards documentation and the infection of celebrity status/hero worship as having importance. People apparently feel the need to self-promote, and a quick-and-easy way of doing that is "publishing" articles like the ones you mentioned. And thanks to the lack of documentation discipline, that depth of content is more or less the norm.

How about when they promise you there's thousands of results, then somehow there isn't a third page of those results...

Sometimes I worry about how long the "site:reddit.com" gravy train will last...

It is getting too hard to make the Internet useful these days.

Not only that, but Bing search results look highly competitive now, if not better in various comparisons.