I don't really wanna use a meta search engine that just pulls their results from bing or google though. That doesn't seem like a sustainable way to build an actual alternative, since eventually google and Microsoft may just choose to change their api terms of service. I'd much prefer to support something independent if I can

Thats no reason for you to switch, just an explanation for why I went with brave. I switched to duckduckgo first and found the results weren't great for me, so I changed to brave anf have found the results better, and they have their own index rather than taking other people's search results, but instead they're taking other people's web content and selling rights to it 🙃. The company seems a little... Lacking :(