This is very similar to my experience.

I was a Kagi user for around 3 years, didn't really ran into issues looking up stuff, but also never really had to compare it with other search engines. I found answers to what I needed, and it was a passable answer. Don't need much else from a search engine.

I left when they started investing my money into muddying search with AI. Yes, you can turn it off. But that still means I get way less worth for what I pay, because instead of focusing the respurces on making a better search engine, they are focusing on AI.

I found out I'm ok with just using DDG or recently Ecosia. Both have AI, I can turn it off, but at least I'm not paying for it so IDC. In the case of Ecosia, at least they have a greenwashing twist as a bonus so I can feel better about myself, lol.

EDIT: Just to make it clear, I kind of trust Ecosia in their mission and I respect what their goal is, but I'm having a hard time trusting a company that adds an OpenAI-based chatbot to their site. They might've already changed it, but when they rolled it out and I saw the sentence "Ask our Ecosiabot about how to be more enviromental friendly" literally right under "This chat is subjected to OpenAI privacy policy" is so extremely ironic I lost a lot of trust in them. But still, at least they are trying to greenwash a bit.