If it works for you... I agree with the general sentiment of "if its free you are the product". However, I see kagi come up so often around here that I feel like it's some astro turfing. I tried it and was not impressed. SearXNG is by far the best search engine I've used in a long time and the best part is I am hosting it locally on my PC, traffic is going out a VPN. You get the privacy and the best results possible since its a meta engine using many different engines.
If so, I wonder if that timeline lines up with when I was trying SearX. For the first few days I was blown away by the results, and then suddenly they became absolute garbage. I ended up switching back to DDG.
Never used brave, I think DDG is actually a pretty decent search engine overall. I use it as my backup to searxng and used it primarily for years now before switching to searxng.