All I have noticed is news sites dominating the SERPS whatever the subject, read one about fragrance oils with little research. News or large health sites reporting on things other than the health or the news is not good practice or user experience. News sites simply spamming articles for traffic. This did not happen years ago and Google rewarding them with the traffic despite the articles having no substance. Does not make a good internet.
Yeah this is very frequently reported here in pretty much every monthly thread.
This started with the core updates and went overdrive after the May and then December 2020 core updates.
Whatever they did with those updates it seems to have included boosting 'authority', resulting in extremely big sites (usually in terms of backlinks) outranking everyone else without even having to try.
Most frequently these happen to be mainstream news sites, likely because it's them that acquire the largest number of backlinks on the whole web. Those sites receive daily hundreds of top-tier backlinks because they report on latest news (it's expected and normal for this to happen).
But you are correct that his did not happen years ago. Those news sites were also very authoritative back then too. So what's going on now? Google gave up on determining relevancy and they decided only authority matters? I don't know. No one outside Google knows.
Seemingly the "problem" (at least from our perspective - Google may think this is just as it should be) is Google is now valuing 'authority' so heavily that if it's high enough it's almost like if everything else gets ignored/overshadowed.
As such, if one of these big mainstream news sites - that command insane link authority - starts writing about any subject it's almost guaranteed it will immediately outrank everyone else. Not really always, but enough times for this phenomenon to be very noticeable in general and causing serious damage to legitimate expert sites that just don't happen to be massively "authoritative" such as the top 10 biggest international news sites.
And finally - because this has been going on for some time now - all these big mainstream news sites are starting to figure this out and are beginning to write (spam) about almost any subject imaginable that has some monetary value. So we've ended up with almost every major news site pushing generic quality affiliate pages, "best X", "X review" etc. pages left and right in any subject that allows this kind of content. Most of the time completely irrelevant to the focus on the respective news site.
The problem of the above is that these news sites are now outranking specialised sites done by genuine experts, simply due to how Google evaluates 'authority' now. Most of these posts are obviously either done by interns or non-expert freelancers and not by actual newspaper staff. The quality is lacklustre at best. Nevertheless, they are outranking everyone because they are hosted on domains with ultra massive 'authority'.
I am unsure if this will change. The May 2020 core update went overboard with this and everyone was convinced they surely must "correct" this as it went too far, and then the December update came and doubled down hard on this even more. So, I am not optimistic this will change. I fear the next core update will crack down on everyone us "regulars" even harder.
