At one point the web was drowned in "listicles," low-effort sites made to match queries like "best movies from the 90s" or "new music in 2023". Google attempted to downrank these sorts of sites because they were in general very very low quality and were just designed to catch a lot of traffic and display ads alongside low-effort content. (Think one page per list entry, each page transition is a whole new set of ads.) Users disliked these. It sounds like your site was misclassified as a low-effort listicle site.
Im sure it is really hard to run a search engine that size. I have ideas how they could improve but it isnt my job. They chose to populate results with big websites which probably is good enough for most users. The problem is that there is now no point creating websites which is terrible for google. If it picks up the domain and (against all ods) deems it worthy of traffic it can be blacklisted at any time.