Their inability to adapt to fix the problems caused by AI and SEO have caused the product to fall apart and users went somewhere else. I do think however their decision to make search tedious for users by moving the correct answer deep into the page (or at least favouring pages that did that) was a brilliant play for advertising but has killed a lot of their core use, making it easier to leave.

Making a product worse for consumers and better for the provider by dropping quality is everywhere even in physical world companies. It's not even just a matter of h to e product, but support. Two decades ago, Home Depot had a push to save on labor at the store that led to having nobody there that understood what they were selling, or could help anyone with any project. Lowes ate them alive for a while, and it took them years to regain enough expertise to just not lose in the market straight up. We also see this happening to restaurants all the time.

The issue with someone like Google, or Microsoft, is that they have a larger moat in many products, so the amount of degradation that internal actors will be happy to push in search for profit is much deeper.