Unpopular opinion: Yes, you are right. It is unofficially dead. People who have been doing SEO in 2016 or before can confirm this.
Before, you could make a great website about a specific topic/niche. You would make sure it is SEO onpage optimized. Then, you would start building links. And guess what? You could EXPECT a certain result. You could watch your websites ranking climbing up the ledder. Yes, there would be a Google Dance and a delay of 2-4 weeks to see results, but YOU WOULD see results. Even with shitty web2.0 backlinks that you would make on Blogspot, Wordpress, etc. you could see an effect. I have been doing this, it made me 6 figures. Then, after a couple of months, there would be a Panda, Penguin, whatever update and you would either lose or win.
Now what? You make a website, heavily optimized and you see jackshit. Indexing problem here, other problem there. Spend $500 for links, still not seeing your keywords climbing up the rankings. Now you need a high DA domain, a "trusted" domain. Your content is not king anymore. It only matters what your domain is. Google be like: Better to display shitty fake content on an authority domain than to display relevant top notch informative content on a newer domain.
I don't even want to start about their monthly or weekly updates, which are absolutely intransparent and it seems like they do not even know by themselves what they targeted or "fixed".
So yeah, SEO is unofficially dead. It became gradually worse.
Right now, I would only go into SEO to sell services. I would never create a blog or website and then hope to make 5 or 6 figures, because it will be incredibly hard and you would have to invest a lot of money in links. What I would do is I would focus on short term videos on TikTok, Reels and Shorts, because they can bring you a shit ton of audience in a very short time.