If by "better" you mean "more profitable search engine, the user be damned", then sure.
As a user, I've found Kagi is much better than free search engines. With DuckDuckGo, I often found myself reverting to Google. With Kagi, almost never.
Because most, if not all, users of a paid engine are real people it could be possible that the quality would actually be better in the long run since there would be less manipulation.
While true, I think people underestimate the bad network effects of being the top search engines causing adversarial development with people optimizing for your specific search engine algorithm ultimately making results worse.
Don't free search engines have a competitive edge because for every search performed, the clicked result better informs future search results.
As such, the more users searching - the more it improves the search engine results quality.
And since Kagi is a paid offering, they will inevitably have less searches performed - leading to lower quality search results?