Why not just use public SearXNG insrances? It's what I do.
I'd like to set up my own instance at some point, but in the meantime, I get all (or most anyway) of the benefits of Searx without any setup or hassle. You can use just one public instance just fine, but what I like to do is use LibRedirect (that name, I know) to point to about 10 or 15 public instances and it randomly selects from those with each search. When I need it to be real specific, I have a couple public instances where I have saved settings.
If I want to use yandex or startpage, or just want to search say wikipedia, I'll use bangs, which just means putting a couple exclamation marks before the engine name and my search, like "!!yandex " or "!!w " and it automatically searches there directly instead of going through the searxng instance.
By far the best way to search these days, imo. The only issue is that sometimes an instance will get rate limited or the server will go down, but then you just use a different public instance.
Oh but they do! Not only do they understand it, they've factored any resulting opposition to it into their cost analysis (likely as a minor nuisance). What Mike Hopkins, the person who said "they don't understand" doesn’t understand, is that this is their entire purpose, their goal, but on a scale much larger than merely that of the local community.