SEO is so broken, it's not about website content or website quality. It's about how much money you pay to some punks - "SEO experts" who are hacking a system. I'm so sick of that.
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One day Google may introduce multiple search rankings, where one of them is SEO and another is the "useful things". But I don't hold my breath.
What about trust-based systems. You choose who you trust and get information that they found not to be SEO-garbage, like trust-rings. When the system can't do it alone, user-centric feedback may work. That could give interesting inputs besides the ones Google already gets using its standard metrics.
I suspect this is actually one of those fundamentally hard problems.
1. Old domain names bought solely for their old SEO rank.
2. Apps on mobile app stores are sold, and updates begin to include shady privacy-invading malware.
3. Old free software projects on various registries (npm etc.) are sold, with the same result as (2).
Recipes would ultimately be a list of ingredients, concise instructions and maybe a picture or two. It should be trivial to train a classifier to detect SEO spam in this context.
I think Google doesn't really have an incentive to do this, as SEO spam typically includes ads which can contain Google ads or analytics/Google Tag Manager which helps Google, thus prioritizing better results would work against their bottom line.
Otherwise, it seems really like a cat and mouse game. Another option may be to force SEO to be indistinguishable from the best content. Is that the current goal?
So, if Google altered their algorithm such that "recipe" content had to be shorter-form in order to perform better in SERPs, how would this change anything? The sites that profit from search traffic would be the ones with their fingers on the pulse of the algorithm, and the resources to instantly alter their content in order to ensure that they continued to rank for the terms that were driving traffic.