That's not true. In fact, they have fought each other in court more than once. And unlike Google, they do not track your movements on the web.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/duckduckgo-what-to-know-about-google-searchs-privacy-focused-rival/
Oh Good. He switched to Bing. Now I feel better! No political bias at Microsoft!
When DDG started out it was a Google front end. So they switched to Bing for whatever constellation of reasons, part of which you mention. But the net result is the same: you’re going to get ranked results that follow the hard Left bias of the so-called tech world.
DDG doesn’t have the money/resources/patents/brainpower to come up with their own competitive search engine; the other guys are too far down that road. It will take some entity with far more backing to pull that off, and would probably end up with something with no real competitive advantage, other then a lack of bias. Personally I think that would be enough and maybe Brave would do it, but the capital to go there would be rather large and thus hard to justify.
How do you account for the DuckDuckGo search results for "Stop the Steal"? All the results were sources spouting left, democrat talking points.