> fact that the results are objectively worse than Google's for the same terms

By what metric? For around a year now I use primarily DDG and I often find much better results, for both work/programming-related stuff as well as day to day stuff(assuming I enabled search in context of a country). They also added a lot of utilities I often used in google like currency converters, calculator, date stuff, I don't know what's the last time I had to switch to google for anything really.