I work with papers in CS/math and have been able to find dates and metadata like DOI pretty quick. There are complications when there are really multiple versions of a paper, like one in a conference that is only an extended abstract and one in a journal, but you would need to figure out which version you want to read in that situation anyway. I agree it's annoying, but coupled with reference manager software like Zotero it's hardly an issue for me.
Google Scholar is a great tool but I fear its days are numbered. It's already frustrating that they removed the feature hot linking to an article's scholar page if you enter the title in google search.
If Google Scholar is sunset that would be a great loss for the academic community. When was that feature removed? I have felt reasonably confident in Google Scholar so far because it is already 18 or so years old.
I work with papers in CS/math and have been able to find dates and metadata like DOI pretty quick. There are complications when there are really multiple versions of a paper, like one in a conference that is only an extended abstract and one in a journal, but you would need to figure out which version you want to read in that situation anyway. I agree it's annoying, but coupled with reference manager software like Zotero it's hardly an issue for me.