Yeah, Google stopped working without JavaScript in the last year (although I believe this is a region-dependent block and may also vary by user agent string)
Later they also blocked other non-JS browsers like links or w3m, so I assume they no longer care. They used to maintain several frontends that worked in really old devices.
I don't think there is any User-Agent that works today, however you can still use the Google index via other search indexes that can fetch Google results without JS (for example Startpage still works). However, it is probably a good idea to have more options available that have their own independent index engine (for example Mojeek). Seirdy has a very good list: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite
for searching in Dillo. Once in a while you may get a captcha from DDG that is far better that any other captcha I have ever seen. The captcha is easy to use and can be a bit fun :)
Incidentally, DDG still works without JS.