This is a great way to describe it. Google still gives me good results for the common stuff, but really fails me when I'm looking for something in the "long tail".
There is, use a different search engine. I've even found something as new as Andisearch good for finding research papers and Qwant good for general searching. There are many more and they keep up with Google pretty well now without the trash.
More than a decade ago, Google had some special-case logic for these "navigational queries". Lee Kai-Fu (head of Google China at the time) said that navigational queries were particularly prevalent in Chinese search traffic.
Though, there's also a use case for people trying to find third-party information about various websites, particularly in trying to figure out if the website itself is a scam. You really want to have the navigational result up at the top unless you have a very high degree of confidence that the site is a scam, but in all cases you want high quality reviews of the site to follow up the navigational link.
I just wish I could find obscure things again.