Ask HN: Has DDG always rewritten URLs on its non-JS search?

I've noticed recently that if I use DDG with Javascript turned off, page URLS get rewritten to go through DDG with an ID attached to them. Ex:

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=duckduckgo%20tracking

Shows its urls in the format:

https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fhelp.duckduckgo.com%2Fduckduckgo%2Dhelp%2Dpages%2Fprivacy%2Fweb%2Dtracking%2Dprotections%2F&rut=a4221949d4d60ca8654aabbfa5700d5d94369f6481bf45c8ac4d6906fd6d63fb

It's possible that this has been happening for a while and I didn't notice it, but I could have sworn this didn't use to happen; I've sold people on using DuckDuckGo by telling them that it didn't rewrite URLS. Was I wrong, or is this a newer change?

The JS-enabled page doesn't change the URL, but it does intercept load events and tries to contact improving.duckduckgo.com. That's a more recent change, and one that uBlock Origin already handles I think. URL rewrites I didn't know about and are a bit harder to deal with. They're also obviously fairly disappointing to see; I'm not sure how tracking which specific link a user clicks on isn't tracking that user, even if the data is "anonymized".