It annoys me greatly that LLMs are not used primarily for search in this way, but rather search is used to disguise them as something else for the purpose of fooling people into parting with cash.

Even the actual search engines aren't using them this way. Google's "AI Overview" is actively harmful to trying to learn anything you aren't already familiar with.

RAG is one of the coolest things I've ever used with an LLM, and it would be exponentially more helpful to me in the majority of the AI tools marketed to me than the nonsense they do implement.