Google's search quality has definitely gotten worse, but DuckDuckGo is still worse than Google. I have DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but occasionally will Google something that DuckDuckGo can't find and Google has it on the first page.
I have this exact same usage pattern. I try to use Firefox and DDG exclusively but when a site borks or the search results are unusable in DDG, it's back into the Google ecosystem with me.
Yeah, ditto for search.brave.com. It's fine but sometimes Google is just more creative or accurate in what it returns.