I believe there is a way to disable bing search by setting some flags in the windows registry. I was affected by this bug, and the way to fix it was to disable online search.

There's a bunch of articles online on how to do it, eg:

https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-wi...

Basically have to set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\BingSearchEnabled to 0

and

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\CortanaConsent to 0

However, I agree with you, that I would've preferd this to be turned off by default. Extra dependencies that bring no extra value are net negative, as seen in there current case where a server-side problem stopped my local search from working.