I got a question from our marketing department why it takes a while for our website to load just the other day. My answer was exactly what you mentioned - forcing us to include tracking scripts from google analytics, tag manager, oracle maximizer, segment, facebook, doubleclick and a handful of other monstrosities that do god only knows what on startup.

Prediction: no change will take place because someone else will say 'without that data, we're flying blind.'

Because DDG and Google search don't show dozens of media files on its search page. They really need to default to a simple search page, and then they can give users the option to use the current richer theme. This product reminds me of the one developed by Wolframalpha a couple years ago with a fancy interface.

You can try the lite version that should be the default version IMHO: https://lite.qwant.com

Definitely a problem. I had 10.24s on first load, which is about 9 seconds longer after google/duckduckgo becomes usable.