While this is certainly true, I’d like to highlight the difference between privacy and anonymity. Kagi is worse because they require payment information (though there is an option which attempts to separate your payment from your searches), but they are better because their privacy policy is better. If you don’t trust the service itself, whether because of its location or any other reason, then you need to be paying in cash or monero, using free services. In both of those cases though, you also need to ensure you don’t deanonymize yourself in other ways. In other words, pay if you don’t want to think about too much, and you more or less trust the company.

I generally agree, but I’d avoid gmail with very few exceptions. They are going to read your email, so whether your solution as another protonmail account, an alias, simplelogin, or another service entirely, it’s almost certain to be an improvement. Keep in mind that you can tell gmail to forward your emails, for anyone who hasn’t updated their address book yet.