Indeed. SEO how it's referred to and done most of the time is almost an anti-pattern: People adjust their system (website) to implementation details of another service (search engines) instead of just fulfilling the "public contract" (exposing good, accessible content).
But that's dangerous, as search engines evolve, change behavior and occasionally penalize this kind of behavior. That's why I always tried to explain to customers they should just focus on good content for humans and not care about explicit SEO after they claimed someone had told them that Google had recently "changed their algorithm" and now did XY.
There are SEOs that cannot be detected and at the end you have quality articles after hundreds of pages. This is the case for maibstream subjects like recipes where you compete with ten of thousands of SEOers.
But that's dangerous, as search engines evolve, change behavior and occasionally penalize this kind of behavior. That's why I always tried to explain to customers they should just focus on good content for humans and not care about explicit SEO after they claimed someone had told them that Google had recently "changed their algorithm" and now did XY.