> I’m having troubling telling whether it’s just my own halo effect or if the initial quality that experienced has started to slip a little

I've had the exact same experience and sharing the same doubts as well.

For programming related queries I'm going to Google 100% though, it understands the intent so much better. But for general queries I use Brave 90%+ of the time. But, it feels like I'm adding !g to the query more often than I used to in the beginning.