This is the logical conclusion of the overuse of „nofollow“. As but one example, the German Wikipedia has for years nofollow‘ed external links. That’s a policy

This is the logical conclusion of the overuse of „nofollow“. As but one example, the German Wikipedia has for years nofollow‘ed external links. That’s a policy that reduces their work load because it discourages spammers. But it also denies the public to profit from all the information that these links convey. Incidentally, English Wikipedia doesn’t use nofollow as far as I remember, showing it’s entirely possible to police edits adding links. (My impression is the German WP Community has a certain ideological bend where they consider links to commercial sites ineligible even if those represent best possible sources of information. It’s not exactly „left-wing“, but closer to the weird mindset that afflicts members of a club when they spend too much time with each other and isolated from he outside). Anyway, Google is really doing us a favor here. There‘s information in those links and willingly disregarding it was hurting their users, i. e. everyone. Detecting spam has also improved quite a bit, so the downside for websites should have lessened somewhat.