Half of what constitutes SEO is an utter disgrace.
Every single hour spent putting work on a website that doesn't go towards any of its users is better not happening. If AI is what it takes so a website doesn't have to "feature" whatever amount of useless stupid paragraphs riddled with keywords to tell Google what the site is about then so be it.
Is that purely a Google thing? I thought the bullshit added to recipes pages was also a copyright thing, in an attempt to stop aggregation services using them.
I've stopped using unqualified Google searches for recipes. Limiting results to allrecipes.com helps a fair amount (they're a pretty unobnoxious site as things go). It's telling that Google doesn't rank them higher.
And there used to be sites that answered the question on the search page. Google pushed them to the bottom.