Topic vs. Keywords - What to focus?

Creating better content requires weightage on both - topics as well as keywords to hit two brids with one stone.
You are not going to create separate topics for crawlers & users - utilize your one blog for both.

So if your go-to content strategy has been focused solely on long-tail keywords, think again. Google “doesn't care” which specific keyword you use. They're looking at the topics that you cover, and how well you've included those topics in your content and on your site.

So yes, they are. It comes from the era when it was all about building content around that one (long tail or not) keyword. It still does matter, but with AI taking over, Google understands the general topic much better, so it is safe not to focus too hard over focus keyword, but rather about the bigger picture.