Generally when people mention this what they are referring to is the seo industry has largely figured out how to game the google algo to get their content to rank high up. This results in content that might not be what you found as useful up high because it more perfectly matches the algo score. In theory with a perfect algo that seo gamification would result in people making better and more useful pages to win seo. In practice, no algo is perfect and so we get what we get.