It's a win, but not a wash, because they cannot serve highly targeted ads, which means they probably can't charge as much and people are less likely to click on.

Try to create a separate google account, use browser profiles, and this particular account only for searches in a specialized field (say CS, IT etc...). Than start looking at the ads you're getting. Google can't do that if the request comes from ddg.

Lack of certain information is a valuable data point. Privacy-conscious searchers are served by many small but profitable niche industries.

It doesn't proxy the request to google, it issues a redirect to google and your browser does the request, with all its cookies.

So what's the point of using ddg instead of google if you do this?

It's just a quick way for the user to also try Google. I usually do search in DDG (default search) if I don't get good results I append !g to get results. Most often though Google doesn't give me much better results.