You may be correct, but I don't think the "letter of the law" is a particularly useful standard to judge Google by. So you can't pay to have your site ranked hi

You may be correct, but I don't think the "letter of the law" is a particularly useful standard to judge Google by. So you can't pay to have your site ranked higher? Who even cares now? At this point you can pay Google to deploy dark patterns that trick people into clicking on ads thinking that they're actually organic results. In a sense that is even better than a higher page rating...