At this point it may be necessary. All of the search engines are essentially the same now and all you can find are mostly a handful of curated e-commerce sites. The "wide" part of the web has all but disappeared.

This is true for stuff that can be sold, but for example my personal blog has most search traffic going to a page about a cartoon theme song.

People still rely on search engines for a bunch of things beyond "best phone 2024".

Things like "best phone 2024 reddit".

J/k, I don't disagree.

with the explosion of AI generated content to meet SEO criteria that may be the only way to have proper access to real content