Why standard keyword research fails and how proper semantic clustering saves ad budgets

Hello everyone! I am reaching out to the community because I am completely losing my mind over our current search advertising performance. We thought we did everything right by the book: we spent days gathering a massive list of keywords related to our business, grouped them loosely into a couple of ad campaigns, wrote catchy descriptions, and set our daily spending limits. But instead of steady growth, our account is constantly bleeding money on garbage traffic. We notice that our ads trigger for completely absurd search variations that have almost nothing to do with our actual services, while our core commercial keywords barely get any impressions. Is it true that standard keyword matching is basically broken nowadays, or are we fundamentally misunderstanding how semantic grouping and search intent actually work in modern advertising platforms? Would appreciate any insights from experienced marketers!