What’s the current state of the art in searching for journal articles? I haven’t been a student for many years. When I was in school at first we used portals like

JSTOR
Science Direct
Elsevier
Galileo

Next, Google Scholar came out and seemed to be a superset of all of those, so it was the best when I left off.
I was on a phone call with a university class a couple of years ago and they told me there was some newer “meta portal” (my term) that was along the same lines but even better than Google Scholar. I can’t recall the name and it’s not obvious which one it is when I try to figure it out by searching the web.
Web of Science is a subscription-based citation database that came out shortly after Google Scholar. I can't compare it to other services such as JSTOR and Galileo (which I have never tried) but at least anecdotally I find it to be better in some respects compared to Google Scholar (better UI and more trustworthy citation counts, at least in my field). However it is subscription-based so whether or not you have access will depend on your employer/institution.
Edit -- There is another citation tool that I feel is criminally underutilized so I feel compelled to promote it. The arXiv has a fantastic browser add-on called the arXiv Bibliographic Explorer which provides detailed information about citations for nearly every article on the arXiv. Even though this is not directly related to your question, I have found it to be an extremely useful tool that not many people know about, so it deserves mention.