This was a good read. Seems like google is the driving force in making websites worse, creating the SEO mess, and therefore making search harder to perform (anti-trust tactics).

Worth noting that when I looked at the new version of the page the way I normally experience the internet - with Firefox and uBlock Origin - it was fine. The only thing that had changed was the addition of the banner across the top, which was just links that I could and would ignore. So the site unnecessaily lost that little bit of real estate at the top, but aside from that, it was fine.

So to get the full effect, I opened Chrome for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long, and checked it out in that. And yes - it was godawful. And painfully stupid.