PageRank was an innovative idea in the early days of the Internet when trust was high, but yes it's absolutely gamed now and I would be surprised if Google still relies on it.
Fair play to them though, it enabled them to build a massive business.
Google’s biggest search signal now is aggregate behavioral data reported from Chrome. That pervasive behavioral surveillance is the main reason Apple has never allowed a native Chrome app on iOS.
It’s also why it is so hard to compete with Google. You guys are talking about techniques for analyzing the corpus of the search index. Google does that and has a direct view into how millions of people interact with it.
Anchor text information is arguably a better source for relevance ranking in my experience.
I publish exports of the ones Marginalia is aware of[1] if you want to play with integrating them.
[1] https://downloads.marginalia.nu/exports/ grab 'atags-25-04-20.parquet'