There's another side to the coin that I think you're, understandably, overlooking. I don't think either side alone is the full story. It's a big grey ball of tradeoffs, no matter how it all falls.
Even with just your own description of your activities you can find perverse incentives and negative externalities.
You aren't exactly incentivized to just create content that satisfies common queries. More fully, you're incentivized to create content that makes people think (rightly or wrongly) their query is being answered while also marketing your goods/services to them as much as possible.
Even assuming the best intentions to actually answer the query - be it altruism, discerning searchers, fear of Google, or something else - the content itself is hardly unbiased. This isn't inherently some kind of moral failure on your part, but it's hardly negligible either for the searcher. Everybody is going to have different thresholds here for what crosses the line, but I think it's understandable that some people are just unhappy having to even put in the time and energy to disentangle this aspect in the first place.
And this dovetails into one of the obvious externalities. Who is doing SEO, and who isn't? That totally unaffiliated small-time blogger that just happened to write up a bit of info after having the same problem as you probably isn't doing a whole lot of SEO. At least, they aren't hiring you to help increase their hosting costs. Somebody trying to find less biased views ends up having to wade through all the sites making enough money to pay for SEO first, to actually find what they're looking for. It should be pretty obvious why that does no favors for SEO's reputation.
But as I said at the beginning, you're not wrong either. This stuff goes deep into 'small' questions like profit-motives and competition for limited resources. Obviously and trivially correct answers aren't here.
I really do appreciate that you're approaching this from the much better intentioned side of things. One of the few things that might be obviously correct is that your approach is better than the sleezy way.
But that doesn't make it all rainbows and sunshine either.
I think you can find exceptions in any discussion, but that's not exactly helpful.
Here's the thing: If I don't answer the user's query accurately, another website will. Then they will get all the traffic. So my long term incentive is to satisfy the query.
Within that there is a certain tolerance and understanding among search users that websites can't publish information for free. See Wikipedia constantly begging for money.
So companies (my clients) can justifiably get away with a small amount of self promotion. But if you take that too far you'll just get punished in the SERPs too.
Even with just your own description of your activities you can find perverse incentives and negative externalities.
You aren't exactly incentivized to just create content that satisfies common queries. More fully, you're incentivized to create content that makes people think (rightly or wrongly) their query is being answered while also marketing your goods/services to them as much as possible.
Even assuming the best intentions to actually answer the query - be it altruism, discerning searchers, fear of Google, or something else - the content itself is hardly unbiased. This isn't inherently some kind of moral failure on your part, but it's hardly negligible either for the searcher. Everybody is going to have different thresholds here for what crosses the line, but I think it's understandable that some people are just unhappy having to even put in the time and energy to disentangle this aspect in the first place.
And this dovetails into one of the obvious externalities. Who is doing SEO, and who isn't? That totally unaffiliated small-time blogger that just happened to write up a bit of info after having the same problem as you probably isn't doing a whole lot of SEO. At least, they aren't hiring you to help increase their hosting costs. Somebody trying to find less biased views ends up having to wade through all the sites making enough money to pay for SEO first, to actually find what they're looking for. It should be pretty obvious why that does no favors for SEO's reputation.
But as I said at the beginning, you're not wrong either. This stuff goes deep into 'small' questions like profit-motives and competition for limited resources. Obviously and trivially correct answers aren't here.
I really do appreciate that you're approaching this from the much better intentioned side of things. One of the few things that might be obviously correct is that your approach is better than the sleezy way.
But that doesn't make it all rainbows and sunshine either.