I found Brave Search became better and its Summarizer works really well, a lot of search queries are answered right there. I absolutly love they have links to google, bing and mojeek after several results, so you just quick jump there if you think results are not good. Also they seem not to alter results to politics or ethics, as DDG does.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/ their results are proprietary process, based on own crawlers and partners like bing, yahoo, yandex, etc. If Bing blacklists something DDG will be affected too.
As for something happened? Check this https://lemmy.ml/post/31321 it is not happened, but always was. DDG is just not very good. Sure if results suits you, than why not, it is ok.