The way it was presented with regards to search engines was that it was supposed to pull data that was more up-to-date than when the model was trained. It does do that, actually, and provides better results too, on average anyway.

But that's just one domain, and "better" doesn't mean "good" or "accurate". In most domains, at least where I work, we've found that RAG overcomplicates things for little benefit, unfortunately.