But if you truly care about privacy or any kind of control, just don’t use kagi

I assume you mean because you have to be logged in in order to use kagi?

They do have anonimised logins for this though: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass which is a pretty good mitigation IMO. As it's a paid service of course proving you paid is a must.

And as for control, I can't agree there. Kagi offers more control than any other search engine through its lenses and the ability to influence the ranking of search results from specific sites.

I don't use their service at the moment, I'm pretty ok with my self hosted SearXNG and I like being able to customise the look and feel there too. But Kagi is excellent as search engines go.

How does one make a comment like this, I wonder, and not substantiate.

why would you say that?

Say more, or say less.

Uh, what? Wanna explain why?