All my personal sites are effectively dead.

Never put ads on them, nothing malignant, but the SEO wars have killed the small web.

I think there is still some hope for self-healing of the web. Increasingly you can't find anything useful using Google, thus more will look for alternate search engines like Marginalia etc. Maybe they will unearth all the golden content from the ancient small web.

Can we please just throw the book at Google for this. Their search monopoly harms everyone but themselves.

you != the rest of the world. When google has ~90% of the search market that makes it a monopoly.