The counterpoint is that it's now actually useless to craft a query that tries to match exact terms, because there's this extra layer on top of it.

So you might be lucky if the inferred intent of the engine was correct, but good luck steering it away. It doesn't help pretty much all query logic operators are merely hints nowadays, more often ignored than not.

I very much preferred a dumber engine for this reason, since it was way easier to search precisely and avoid SEO, even as the SEO game changed.

I'm also using a local searx instance now. I'm not terribly happy about it as bing/ddg also have very similar issues, so searching for exact terms still doesn't work the way it should. But it's much easier to blackhole SEO silos, pre-filter queries NOT matching my exact queries, as well as yielding more obscure content.