Personally, I found people to be overreacting and DuckDuckGo‘s actions reasonable and transparent. Here’s the story:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts/
I’ve used Startpage until they got bought by an ad company. Haven’t looked into it since then:
Visit a new city and spontaneously finding a good restaurant matching your criteria. I heavily rely on reviews for this usecase as well as being able to search e.g. for „vegan restaurants“ in a certain area, which also matches reviews with the word in it.