Things really even worse. All that SEO crap is invented, promoted and headed with all that FAANG bastards. The essence of SEO in reality is to make your site favored by FAANG, nothing more. Instead of making useful content or goods that people like, the basic intent of SEO is to make your site as FAANG want it. If they want to push any narrative, they just will force you to make your site following it. And when you do all that they want (add surveillance widgets crap, change site language to fit their narrative, add anything they want like BLM shit or covid warnings, etc.) they will dump your SEO rating to push more crap and make your site not really belonging to you anymore.

Fuck SEO. fuck all that FAANG crap. Believe me, you will get much higher user/customer quality if you will not fall to that shit at all. It really worth it. People who really need your content/goods will find you in any case, and it will be your site, your content, your goods and your users and customers, not their.