I have had similar experiences constantly.

I have a gut feeling that people who frequently bemoan bad search results fall into one of two categories:

• They have all kinds of tracking, and constantly watch Youtube Shorts or TikTok videos. Meaning their learned behavior is "This person enjoys low-quality spam content and lots of ads", because let's face it, portrait-mode shortform videos are primarily that, a vessel to push ads pretending to be genuinely content hidden among content barely better than ads in the first place.
• They have tracking entirely supressed and their browser so hardened that Google can't even know that if this user puts in "needle", they do mean a physical object. They don't even know the language the user is searching in, basically. As a result virtually no weighting happens which allows spam content to rise to the top based on its built-in SEO efforts.

In the end, the second case is not something Google can truly optimize for. Or rather, it'll never be their intention to do that. Though I will say DDG's and Bing's equally or worse search results indicate that a certain level of tracking might actually be beneficial, but we'd need a morally trustworthy keeper of the data (as in, it needs to be owned by the people or something!), nto Google.
And in the first case, I wish they'd do something about that. I can see why before the proliferation of the constant-ads-as-content spam that is shorts, tracking video watching habits to figure out general habits made sense, but especially because you no longer actively decide on which video to watch, this can no longer be valid input to user behavior analysis.