This is a categorically false premise. The kind of statement that only makes sense when you're in a deep bubble and entirely removed from the average person's use of the internet.
Deliberately removing yourself from Google is fine for the author who is more concerned about taking an ideological stance than they are about being discoverable, but removing yourself from Google is terribly bad advice for anyone who wants to help people find their content.
Many people do use Google to find content and people, even if you don't.
This is accurate, somewhat. A lot of people do expect to find things of value when the use Google to search.
But people who are more technical know it's a bit of a faff and bother to get Google to spit out what you're actually looking for, outside of "who is Chloe Grace Moretz" or something equally banal.
And Google-the-Company does treat the Internet like it is their corporate property. Alphabet won't change unless it's made to do so.
I typed "Joey Hess" into Google.
The author's blog pops up as the first result, presumably because it hasn't been deindexed yet. The first page of results also includes his GitHub and an HN comment talking about him that links me to his Patreon. The search results are, I would say, very relevant and very good.
I think these claims that Google is useless are coming from people who aren't even trying to use it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lfgss
That will return the website as a first result (I run https://www.lfgss.com/ )... but no description or metadata. Lots of tangential results talking about it... the first result is more like a shadow profile, a more fact an exact domain match exists but nothing more.
Two months ago I had almost 7 million pages indexed from that site.
For this community, it was their objection to their content being used to train AI that caused them to request me (the owner / admin) to exclude bots. I surveyed more widely, presented arguments in a balanced way, then when the result was overwhelming I hard blocked all known bots and useragents and pretty much everything that looks like a bot and user agent.
It's early anecdata, but sign-up rates have not been impacted at all.
Several other communities I've run have taken similar decisions.
Defensively with the UK Online Security Bill some of the other communities I run are considering similar things.
Feels like the end of an era, communities seeking to protect themselves from external threats, and search engines providing as little value as search pre-Google.
Let me take the opportunity to thank you. This is a rather amazing forum. Kudos to you for listening to what the community wanted. This is probably my all-time favorite thread: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/172374/