I tried Tor for a while but it was too clunky and when used in conjunction with a search engine like Mojeek, was unusable. Whatever it was doing in the background made it impossible to search, with most failing due to suspected bot activity.

Yes, this is the point: Search engines are harvesting YOU and YOUR SEARCH TERMS! TOR prevents that, and they don’t like it.

OTOH, DDG Search and DDG(Onion): https://duckduckgogg42xjoc72x3sjasowoarfbgcmv/ et al., almost always works for me. Startpage and Startpage(Onion), too, but Mojeek and Brave Search show results less often.

I made up my mind years ago to stick to TOR Browser and TOR VPN network for anonymity, privacy, and security regardless of poor response times. Today, I feel that that choice has been vindicated. TOR response times are no worse than they ever were, but response times viewing heavily ad-ridden sites with “normal” browsers have caught up. TOR blocks receiving a lot of ads and tracker folderal that “normal” pages spew out to all comers. It’s just that a handful of search engines — and many and yet more Web sites — will not serve content to TOR’s VPN network. But — You know what? — screw them!

I will admit to using the Chromium browser to retrieve must-have content from sites whose Web-hosting providers block the TOR network because — believe it or not — some of those sites don't support Firefox. It's deja vu all over again for those of us who lived through the Netscape Browser Wars.