But for the average user, until a better Google comes along, I think it's OK to trust Google with their searches. And compartmentalization is paramount to information security, my point being that trusting some other company besides Google with that data is not acceptable, which is why I find that intercepting HTTPS connections is simply wrong and evil, regardless of reasons. This besides the fact that intercepting HTTPS traffic increases the attack surface, making users less secure.
We know Google does what it does. DDG's reason for existence is predicated on not doing so.
If DDG were found to be lying, I'd guess >80% of its customer base would evaporate overnight. It would mean destroying many years of branding, trust and relatively difficult cultivation of user browser defaults.
But that's worth gaming out - what would make it worth it to light all that on fire? About the only thing I can think of is a Lavabit-style conundrum, wherein our intelligence-overlords threaten someone's freedom. So, absolutely could happen, absolutely would come out.
So that's why I trust DDG to be less forthcoming with their logs.
And the "not even anonymous" is not an option: to be able to have a fully functioning phone, I hardly can escape declaring my full details to Google.
And this is clearly an "evil" choice of Google: I never created a Linux, Debian, Ubuntu or Mint account to keep my desktop computer up-to-date and featured by additional apps.
Of course there are some other less intrusive search engines (DuckDuckGo, maybe Qwant), but unfortunately they still are less efficient than Google for fine or rare searches.