The mature answer is "it depends"

Absolutes are rarely 100% true, and it entirely depends on your perspective, your use cases, and your expectations

Neither DuckDuckGo nor CloudFlare (the other favourite punching bag around here) have surveillance capitalism business models, but they do require you to trust someone else's software running on someone else's computers, and you still need to communicate with them over someone else's networks

From my own perspective, which suits me fine but might not suitable for you, I prefer to avoid surveillance capitalism companies like Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Google

I'm also not a free-speech maximalist: I want to live in a world where information flows freely, but I acknowledge that not every single idea deserves exactly the same amplification

The same people screeching about DuckDuckGo and CloudFlare regarding censorship are often exactly the same people claiming that LGBTQIA and Black history education is not "age appropriate", so even free-speech maximalists are rarely consistent

SearX.org is what I've switched to. I quite like it so far. Open Source and highly customizable and more private than the others out there.

DDG was good option when it came first. But these days I do not like the path they're taking. And I wouldn't recommend anyone caring about privacy and censorship to use it either.

Searx is the best option as of now. And I recommend this instance with some little bit of preference modification.

Sorry for the simplistic grid of analysis here:

DDG is a US company, and under the Patriot and FISA (and other) Acts, it makes it fair game for the US institutions to request access to any of its data regarding any of its user, without any sort of judicial process.

So in short if your concern is privacy (not even if you have any political activity that wouldnt be 100% aligned with the foreign policy of the US!) and are a NON-US person, then it's better to avoid connecting to the servers of any US company. Is it easy to do? hell no! we're probably talking about 90% of the web as of now... (think: AWS, Cloudflare, Google, etc.)

(+ i think DDG is hosted on AWS, and Amazon is a premium partner of US intelligence anyways..)

DuckDuckGo censors things based on politics, so no. I think StartPage is better, but still mildly sketchy, as it functions as an encrypted proxy to Google. That is, it doesn't track you, and searches aren't recorded, but the results may still be a little skewed. The cool thing about StartPage, though, is that it provides a web proxy to view other webpages in, to prevent third-party tracking.

Duckduckgo has had a star in my book until recently. Because they have been dishonest about their tracking. They do enable Microsoft trackers. But if I have understood it correctly, this is only the case for their apps.