You seem to be overly focusing on certain parts of the article to make your point. The fact that DDG is terrible at searching for error messages (showing sites experiencing the errors rather than explanations of the errors) is a pretty non-trivial minus for developers.

One guy making a point in a blog post doesn't make a fact.

In my own experience, google is now offering poorer results to the point of being useless. I've been using it to search for error message for about 15 years now. While on the other hand duckduckgo very often nails it with a relevant stackoverflow result in instant answer.

I guess ymmv according to how much you're inside the bubble.

I'd like to see something more factual to show how much ddg sucks at fulfilling queries for info to fix error message vs unfiltered google.

I've never had a problem with technical searches on DDG, since I use bangs to narrow them down (!so, !msdn, !mdn, etc.) Having DDG as the main search engine allows entering these bangs in the address bar just like the browser's search shortcuts. Google has gotten too smart for me lately.

The odd person - or even every geek on the planet - working around tracking, etc makes bugger all difference to anything. If you wish to complain about an abuse, write to advocacy groups, protest and / or write to your democratically elected representative. Anything else is the equivalent of signing an online petition or changing your Facebook profile picture.