Not even going to read the article but I’m going to go with “no, no they didn’t earn the price hike.” To me, to “earn” a price hike means new features or better functionality with the current platform, not just spamming me with mediocre content. Give me higher bitrate streaming, lossless audio, better ways to organize my watchlist, better desktop/laptop experience, etc, then MAYBE it’ll be worth paying a bit more to me.
It’s worth “comparison shopping” with search engines. Run some common queries on multiple engines and see which ones fit what you like. Google takes up a lot of the mindshare for sure, but there are absolutely other options that will probably surprise you with how good they are.