That "finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics" needs to actually exist on the Web and not on the dark Web; that is, linked from somewher

That "finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics" needs to actually exist on the Web and not on the dark Web; that is, linked from somewhere so a search engine can crawl it. That is generally no longer true, due to human nature and the rise of walled platforms and/or non-Web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Medium, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. Most content is either private, or public as part of an offhand comment/discussion thread. Actual public pages with high quality content are near extinct. In the few cases where it may be true, the results are sorted for the common denominator, especially since most people who would be looking for such niche information have disabled personalization, so Google can only assume that you are an average person who wants common denominator results.