This you-know-better-than-me mindset is why all technology is converging to garbage. I can't speak for OP, but for me, you are half correct: I am indeed ultimately searching for answers, but I want the piles of web pages for an hour, and that is how I will find my answer. I don't like it when systems remove my agency by believing they can correctly predict my intent. (They can't.)

In a lot of cases today’s AI systems can easily predict your intent once they accumulate enough context about you. Not in all, but when they predict incorrectly it’s easy to correct them using natural language. And nobody is removing the option of digging in the pile, it’s just that I don’t see why anyone would want to, in most cases. I certainly don’t - I got better things to do with my time.

But there is no agency being removed here. You are being given more options by adding a button to chat if you so desire. It’s very small and unobtrusive

Ads, sponsoring and SEO spam were also very unobtrusive for a while. A few decades passed and we have to sift trough all the garbage to find anything relevant in our searches, it's very likely that search engines will push harder and harder for these AI assistants while making finding organic content and authoritative sources even harder, resulting in it being nearly impossible to do research by yourself rather then trough an AI that has god knows what bias and perhaps subtle ad driven bias into it.

Take a look at a Google results page from 2009 and then from 2012 onwards. "Unobtrusive" is clearly a matter of opinion.

Sure, it’s subjective, but are you disagreeing that the new DDG chat button is unobtrusive?

There is an inverse relation between sites with ads, and sites that contain useful information that require time to look through. Open access journals, StackExchange, product support messageboards....none of these have ads.

In fact, it's the sites peddling trivial BS that are chock to the brim with ads.