Quotes or pluses stopped working a while ago.

Even "Verbatim" isn't actually verbatim.

I am amused that people are only now realizing just how awful Google has got compared to 2000s.

That's simply not true. Quotes superseded pluses and they definitely still work and it's trivial to demonstrate.

"mainframe" "kubernetes" vs mainframe kubernetes

https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&fg=1