Well yes but the point was kinda moot because it was easily possible to add an opensearch provider and every self-respecting search engine supports that. Why wouldn't they? It makes it easy for users to adopt them and it's not hard, just some boilerplate code.

So the URL entry box wasn't really needed for the main purpose. It's nice to use the feature to use with things that aren't literally search engines though. Or to tweak the URL. I wonder, is the AI avoidance thing very effective? Not that I use Google directly but still.. (I use SearXNG as meta search)