I've noticed, and others have here as well, that Google results have progressively gotten worse. I don't see a lot of what they are doing in the background either (some of it is already AI) but I know for certain that my results have increasly become more revenue generating than what I wanted (without adding more specific search terms). So AI isn't what exactly has made Search bad.
I suggest spending more time learning how something works. I've found in my experience it helps alleviate the feeling of anxiety I would get when I didn't know what was going on.
DuckDckGo (DDG) seems like they're being transparent on how they're implementing this and how it's going to be used. You're still being given a list of websites and not just raw answer output so I don't see how it's hiding anything more than is already.
As long as they continue to do that and it produces noticable improvement in results it's a win in my book.
Edit Here is what they're doing: