Can you imagine if they'd skipped all of that and put the effort into keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it? Or even just skipped the second part?
If they focused on keeping search results genuinely high-quality, I think the outcome could have been very different. Basically everyone I know slowly began shifting their questions to something like ChatGPT because Google search results were only presenting irrelevant SEO'd garbage with 12 ads shoved into every page. Slapping the lowest quality model at the top as an "AI Overview" and removing the one genuinely useful part of search at that point (widgets like the dictionary) was the final nail in the coffin for me at least.
No, even if Google search of old still existed, LLM Q&A would still be trouncing it. This is because people don’t like to click/follow links, they don’t like to read, and they don’t like to have to comparatively evaluate multiple pieces of information.
keeping Search profitable without enshittifying it
I don't think Google had much to do with it. It has way more to do with the internet concentrating into major communities where all the content is private. Even Reddit content is going this way. Most FB and Instagram content are private. All of Discord is unreachable by crawlers.
Prior to this, just about everything on the web was open for crawlers since content wanted to be found.
Google caused this by pushing people towards "brands" rather than individual pages. Those platforms only exposed the data necessary for SEO and Google refused to punish them for it.
