This is a fantastic claim. I've been making web pages since the '90s and using web browsers just as long, and I can't think of a single instance of this. Perhaps it existed and I never knew about it? Can you provide some evidence for where and when this was the case?
I've thought a little bit about this, and I agree that always on is a big part of the problem. I think if I were the time lord, I'd aim for crippling wireless computer networking. I think I want everything we have computing and internet wise, if it's not available wirelessly, and thus always.
I can't answer for Americans for a whole, but I live in the USA and I pay with credit card by default. My personal reasons:
* Cards are convenient. No need to go get cash, no change at each transaction to manage carrying around.
* Cards give a discount in the form of "cash back". (As mentioned elsewhere, this really just inflates the cost of everything for everyone, but I might as well claw it back.)
* I don't actually go "into debt". I pay off my card (automatically!) every month, and incur no interest charges. I use it like a slightly deferred debit card with benefits.
The last bullet being significant to your point: I don't "spend money on [a] loan".
What prevents it is that the web in 2026 is very different than it was when OG pagerank became popular (because it was good). Back then, many pages linked to many other pages. Now a significant amount of content (newer content, which is often what people want) is either only in video form, or in a walled garden with no links, neither in or out of the walls. Or locked up in an app, not out on the general/indexable/linkable web. (Yes, of course, a lot of the original web is still there. But it's now a minority at best.)
Also, of course, the amount of spam-for-SEO (pre-slop slop?) as a proportion of what's out there has also grown over time.
IOW: Google has "gotten worse" because the web has gotten worse. Garbage in, garbage out.
I drive a hybrid with a weird size/shape 12V battery. (It uses the traction battery for starting, so only needs a smaller 12V for e.g. accessories and simple bootstrapping of electronics.) Though I normally do my own maintenance at this scale, when it went bad I went to the dealer because they both had the right battery and didn't charge much more than parts. Plus drove me home after dropoff, and drove me back there when it was done (a few hours later? fuzzy memory), at no extra cost.
IME the modern web is not amenable to user scripting like it was ~10 years ago. Then, most things were a simple static HTML document, more templated then generated. Now virtually everything (whether it's useful or not) is a heavy complex "app" that pops in at various times, only has arbitrary/volatile identifiers, and is generally harder to interact with as a user script.
For Greasemonkey proper (which has always only been a Firefox extension) the big pain point was Mozilla's forced migration to new extension APIs (2015: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev... ). This required a major rewrite, taking over a year, and not to add new features but rather just to not bit rot away. Then what felt like right after that, they completely deprecated classic extensions, forcing only web extensions (2017: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firef... ). This required an even more thorough rewrite again, and made it not difficult but actually impossible to keep all functionality.
Greasemonkey has been stable (not abandoned, but not worked on very much!) since then. No forced MV3 yet in Firefox.
I'm honestly guessing here because I'm not an insider and I don't naturally understand what's going on with this made up word, but I think it's:
1. Name is "coq" which is pronounced like "cock". Tee hee hee I'm so funny I made you say a bad word. (Opinions can differ, but this word being bad isn't a terribly rare opinion IMO.)
2. Obviously, that means Q (at the end of a word!? *) is pronounced like a hard K.
3. Enough people don't like being "forced" to say that word, pick a new name, new name is "rocq". I was confused like you for a while until I figured out the above. If q->k, then this is pronounced "rock".
4. New name learner: Why in the world would you pronounce a Q (at the end of a word) as a K? (and/or) How am I supposed to pronounce that name? I've never seen a word like that before.
5. Oh, tee hee, because of an immature joke from the old name. (Have to explain the old name and make the innuendo, to make the new name make any sense. And the new name makes so little sense, it would be very natural to ask how it came about.)