DDG has never worked for me, and I've tried. While I've been a happy Brave Search user since day 1. I'm not joking when I say it's the best search experience after Google, by a mile.
I used to be a ddg user exclusively. The only time I use google is when searching a location nearby. Ddg has gotten worse over the last year or two, unusable almost for anything that isn't current events. It is full of blog spam whenever I search anything.
I've been using gigablast here and there, it's good for obscure, completely organic search results, but that means it's results feel like search before google existed. Brave fills the gap for me, it feels like how google used to feel before all the cruft started getting added in.