Enshittification isn't when companies make their products worse on purpose, for the sake of making it worse. The goal isn't to get worse, the goal is to maintain competitive force and increase profit margins by way of strategically "optimizing" previously good products to squeeze ever more profit.

Exactly. Google isn't intentionally delivering shitty search results to maintain a competitive force or increase profit margins, but because they're fighting a constant battle against people trying (and succeeding) to outsmart their algorithms.

The comment I replied to was specifically talking how Google was attempting to deliver a good product while they were small and is now leveraging it's market position to deliver worse search reults.

And that's just wrong, it has nothing to do with Google burning through venture capital back in the days or being the most popular search engine nowadays. Sure, the ads are annoying, they take all your data and all that could be reasonably called enshittification, but the crappy search results aren't intentional.