Not OP

It also supports HA development, and keeps me from requiring my wife to understand tailscale.

As someone else said, the main reason is to support the devs.

Secondary benefit is the features are seamless and not something I have to maintain. I only have so much time in my day, so I have to choose which things I want to DIY and which I want to pay someone else to manage, but that's a side benefit to supporting the devs.

For me, it was more the quality of search than privacy concerns. The latter I could mitigate, as you wrote.

But, oh man, the search quality on Kagi is so much better than everywhere else. The ability to just outright block domains in results, chef's kiss.

I hear you! I was on the same boat - I had telemetry locked down as much as possible, but I eventually got tired of the arms race and decided to give Kagi a spin.

Took a while to commit but a big selling point was being able to bring my very non-technical wife along for the ride.

If you're interested, try something like searxng and route it through a VPN or vps.