I haven't used google in years and didn't realize it was this bad. How are they able to keep their market position?

Market momentum probably. People "Google" things. People don't "Kagi" things or "DuckDuckGo" things.

I question why Instagram is so popular. I don't use it but my wife does and she constantly runs into errors and bugs. It's a multi billion dollar company and suffers from the sort of issues that beta software does.

They got to their position first, got the market share and then enshittifed from there.