It depends on your goal.

If you just want privacy for your daily not-to-weird usage and ease in both in the sense of setting it up and in that of good results and that’s it, DDG is probably fine for you.

I use Brave, simply because unlike most others, it has it’s own crawler. For me it’s results have been slightly better than DDG too, but I also hear people claim the opposite so I guess it really depends. DDG uses Bing’s results, and many others are also more like privacy front-ends for Bing or Google. If you want to totaly leave Big Tech, be it to not help with their power or because of principle, that’s likely the one that’s the most easy with the best results that fits.

SearXNG is self hosted and less accurate, but the most privacy friendly and not attached to any company as you host your own instance, while with Brave you still rely on Brave’s goodness. If you want total control, you want something like this.

I don’t use anything else from Brave, and default search engines are easy to change, so I’m personally not too worried about Brave’s power over me. I do preffer to stay away from Google and Microsoft, and only access them (prefferably trough privacy front-ends) if no other option works decent enough for me. I also prefer not to self-host due to the time and knowledge needed to do so securely. Well, I have knowledge, but I don’t want to worry about those things for my peivaye stuff all the time. Hence the choice of Brave.