If that's all you can complain about, you agree with the parent comment for 99.99%.
And companies do force it.
And companies do force it.
You're breaking the expected behavior of something that performed flawlessly for 10+ years, all to deliver a worse, enshitified version of the search we had before.
For now I'm sticking to noai.duckduckgo.com
But I'm sure they'll rip that away eventually too. And then I'll have to run a god dang local search engine just to search without AI. I'll do it, but it's so disappointing.