I’ve tried to replace Google with both DDG and Bing. Both of their results are frankly terrible compared to Google’s. Google’s transition to its current hybrid Ask-Jeeves-style question/traditional query search engine, along with its inline answers above the result list both blow its competitors out of the water. Google also does a much better job of letting the user know the freshness or up-to-dateness of results with its inline last-modified/updated time stamps.
Both of those things have made it impossible for me to switch off of Google without immediately having problems quickly finding relevant, up-to-date information on the web. I do desperately want to switch, though.
I also especially despise AMP. It constantly breaks websites and itself, especially on iOS.
Personally I need to switch from ddg to Google maybe 0.1% of my searches, but at least for you you've managed to avoid Google 70% of the time, and it's not like adding a !g to do so takes more a milisecond.
How long ago did you try DDG? Years ago I had a similar experience to you, and switched back, but now DDG is much better for me, and I only try !g < 5% of the time, often with no luck there either.
DDG is fine for many types of queries. It also doesn't have many of (what I consider) the drawbacks of google's search: hostile ad positioning, AMP, autoscraped meta crap. Pretending you can't compare them is ridiculous.