Is SEO still entirely keyword based?

Why isn't ML and natural text processing playing a big role to deliver higher quality results? It seems everything that I search for it is indeed solving my problem, but the keyword inside that result is always the highlight.

I'm not an SEO guy, two years ago I made a side project and I started a blog in it. I decided not to care about keywords because I'm familiar with ML and I thought google will "figure it out what I mean" and rank me properly. I was very wrong, to this day none of those articles rank anywhere even if they're high quality.

I'm about to start a blog again for my business, I suppose I should focus on keywords this time?