Until the past month, when I would search for a news story on StartPage, it would give me several pages of listings under the news tab unless it was an obscure story. Now, it gives me a single page. At the bottom of the page, there's a single 1 instead of the multiple digits there used to be. Same for Brave. Looks like they've been cucked.
I'm not using Bing or Google, or their whore, duckduckgo.
Convenience and levels of censorship?
Disregarding accepting ANY level of censorship, you got convenience right. Convenience and apathy is the sheep's way of accepting what's happening. If you support Big Tech, I hope you don't complain about them, their power, their shady practices, and their wokeness. Because that would be hypocritical.
Wrong.
I've significantly limited my exposure to most big tech corporations by keeping things separate as much as possible: different browser, different operating system, different mail server, different mail accounts, etc.
Using an ad-infested chrome browser for anonymous shopping based on a fake VPN IP is just a convenience you indulge in at times. The browser is I believe set on auto-delete of all cookies when you close it.