Does Google Ignore Meta Tags for Keyword Ranking in SEO ?

In SEO, Meta tags are the essential part of the website that describes web-page content to both search engines (crawlers) and website visitors.

In other words, the meta tags are primary things for all search engines that appear in the HTML code of a website page & tell the search engine what the page is about; they are the first impression and point of contact for all search engines.

As per John Muller (2017), "Meta Tags can affect the way that users see your site in the search results and whether or not they actually click through to your site."

For a long time, the meta tag has been a valuable piece of an overall SEO strategy. Initially, the use of meta tags was to contain the relevant words and phrases that described how the site should/could be listed, in the search results. For a long time, the meta tag(or metadata) was a valuable piece of SEO data. Yet, over time, this was highly abused by people trying to game the system to rank higher.

According to Matt Cutts's statement in a video in 2009 "You know what, too many people have spammed that too much. We really (just) don’t use this information at all."

And

"At least for Google, we don’t use that (meta keywords) information in our ranking even in the least little bit"

Did Google stop using meta tags as Keyword-Ranking Factors?

"On the 21st of September 2009, Google published an article on the Google Search Central Blog that confirmed that the keywords meta tag is not used in ranking web search results."

Yeah...! Google stopped using meta keywords as a ranking factor because they were overused and spammed by SEO professionals and marketers. A few times ago, search engine crawlers used to judge web pages only on their content, not any "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page. And, in those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords.

What's the Actual Answer By The Way?

It's not mean that don't use the meta tags in your website with too many less necessary keywords or something. People can not have that like intellects, and search engine optimization professionals would always look for an easy way to the top of the search results. That is all the crawler's chronology talks about in SEO.