I’d agree that the average HN user and certain professions like developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to Google and recently stuck with Kagi.
If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter words into their browser’s navigation/search bar and are happy to get useful results.
It’s worth to remember that Google is the default search engine in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).
Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new Windows computer from work. She didn’t notice that she was using Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change the browser as well as the search engine.