I've had very similar experiences, I'd tried DDG several times over the years but around ~12 months ago I found DDG's usability and quality of searches to jump significantly.
I completely disagree on the quality front. I really wanted DDG to be good and I tried sticking with it for a while. I found usability (reads keyboard shortcuts, special keywords, etc.) a breath of fresh air compared to Google. But it's no substitute for the significant lack of quality results. For when you don't really need search it works great.
DDG is terrible at any location type search and extremely US centric.
You can switch to country mode but then it stops including loads of results.
A perfect example is when you search for a product or book or something. Without the switch, it returns the company website and amazon.com, the latter being utterly useless and irrelevant to anyone outside the US.
But if you turn the switch on, the company website disappears, but you get amazon.co.uk.
Or another example, I was searching for a butternut squash soup recipe. Oddly DDG had no BBC food results. Until I clicked the switch, then it did, but loads of good other recipes completely disappeared.
As for bar, restaurant, etc. names, ugh. DDG is useless.
They need to figure out how to do local searches with privacy, a way I can set a rough location and they remember it.
At the moment their location centric searches are a decade behind Google.
Well, as DDG doesn't track you, you'll have to provide it a bit more context, such as the city you'd like to conduct the search for (or language or country), either in the search query itself, or using the switch displayed conveniently on top of every page of search results. I don't find that too onerous.
Conversely, I find it annoying when Google gives me Swedish results, just because my VPN happens to route through Uppsala today.
I've searched for books, bars, restaurants, opera, and plenty more in many countries (with VPN routed to plenty of other countries) in the last several years on DDG without any issues, and with no need to switch to other search engines.
And you way under estimate how much work it takes to make and maintain a proper dark mode across a site. If it was truly 3 lines of CSS, every single website out there would have native dark mode.
