I use Google only for vanilla search that shows I am a good citizen(navigation, online shopping, general research on movies and sports...etc). I don't want my search Identity to be fully profiled by Google. Police(and other bad actors like a hostile government) are more likely to access my data on Google than on other lesser know search engine.
(OK, reasonable chance Yandex isn’t compromised by your government, but the others?)
Without a VPN or tor on at least some of those browsers, though, I imagine the metadata strewn about could get stitched back together on the data-broker (ad-tech) end of all those transactions.
this is why RMS ssh's into a pine server to read email, i reckon.
While compliance is certainly not optional, the value of your compliance is highly dependent on your technology. (The authors mention this in the article by writing that Apple does not collect the same kind of data as Google.)
I think it is like choosing VPN providers. You never know if they were involved in compromising their customers until they are caught compromising their customers.
So if you have a choice between two similar VPN providers, and one of them is known to be involved in compromising their customers, you use the other one.
I do not see how this would be any different with search.