Search, "what hotel to stay in san francisco soma". You'll see that every single result above the fold is an Ad.

In fact it doesn't even give me a single useful piece of information. #1 result is a link to expedia. #2 is to hotels.com, #3 to the trip advisor. Scroll down Google Hotels widget. Then on the 3rd browser viewpoint page I get actual query results.

It's less about paid placement taking priority (as in intentionally degrading results) but more that there's no incentive to spend money improving organic search results where at best it'll do nothing and at worst decrease the profitability of paid results (people are less likely to click on them if the organic results are good), not to mention that crap organic results also benefit Google as these websites often have Google Ads or Analytics.