Google have moved on from allowing exact searches to me made, sometimes you have to think "if I didn't know what I actually wanted to see, and was trying to make a question-form query about it, what would I write" and that gets better results, IME, than something where you know the exact words you want (which even with "" might not be in the link).
I tried it and I think you're not right. The reason why this works most of the time (at least on reddit) because there are lot's of threads which put the date in the title.
I was searching for "what phone should i buy in 2020 site:reddit.com" and while a few results where from a year ago, most where from January 2020.