DDG is a more practical default than Google simply because I don't get a "We'd like to abuse your personal data" pop-up that gets in the way every time I open an Incognito window to search for something.
For me this is terrible. I can scan through 100 search results pretty quick, going 4 pages deep is something I have always done often. Seeing the reported ~82 million results shrink suddenly to 4 pages and maybe 389 results with ommitted included is extremely disheartening. But at least google scholar still works properly.
When I found out about this I was so pissed I made a crappy little website to more easily complain about it to people. http://googlesearchonlyreturns400results.lol/
But yes, I do use !g when needed to jump to Google. It's just the default that works better on DDG for me due to the Incognito window issue - so much so that I've been running DDG by default for quite a long time now, just for that reason.