So google's shitty search now economically incentivizes sites to destroy information. Can there be any doubt that Google destroyed the old internet by becoming a bad search engine? Could their exclusion of most of the web be considered punishment for being sites being so old and stable that they don't rely on Google for ad revenue?
I'll just assume you neglected to read TFA, because if you had, you would have discovered that it links to an official Google source that states CNET shouldn't be doing this.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689018769782476800
But who knows, really? They run things to extract features nobody outside of Google knows that are proxies for "content quality". Then run them through pipelines of lots of different not-really-coordinated ML algorithms.
Maybe some of those features aren't great for older pages? (broken links, out-of-spec html/js, missing images, references to things that don't exist, practices once allowed now discouraged...like , etc). And I wouldn't be surprised if some part of overall site "reputation" in their eyes is some ratio of bad:good pages, or something along those lines.
I have my doubts that Google knows exactly what their search engines likes and doesn't like. They surely know which ads to put next to those maybe flawed results, though.