It's not that weird - Google isn't a search engine company, they're an advertising company.

I'm not just flogging a dead horse here - they don't care how good the search results for these types of queries are, they need to be just good enough to stop you from moving to search via Perplexity, Chatgpt, Claude etc. They also need to be as cheap as possible to generate.

Google makes money when you search for things to buy which is why they'll give you an ad-free experience on things that they never made much money off anyways (eg "why is the sky blue?") - they want you to be around when you search for something they can (eg "jewellery"). Note that they never give you AI slop when you're doing a product search.

Unfortunately people both expect answers phrased in response to their questions, and people have generally poor skills at picking up on authoritative-sounding bullshit. Also if they give you "an answer" and stop you from moving to another site with more detail (and possibly ads from someone else!) you're more likely to ask follow up questions on google.