I totally agree with you critical thinking and discussion is the best that can happen but at least at the time of writing my comment i didn’t see any of it, most of what i saw was:

• “you’re a bot/this is written by a bot”
• “the website got iOS in it, it doesn’t belong here”,
• “I never heard of that website, it’s just an AD”(if if its true it would be helpful but IMO its just someone trying to write articles and trying to get better) - - “you’re a shill/are paid”,
• “the downsides of SearXNG don*t matter because you you can use a different instance” (thats a bit like saying “yes Google got downsides but you can switch to bing, yahooy, yandex, baidu”(obviously over the top example))
• “I like Kagi, its the best 10$/month that i spend” (this one at least got got a tiny bit of substance but is also not helpful)

The only helpful things that I saw were when people pointed out spelling mistakes.

if it seems “horribly biased” let them know why you have that feeling so they can improve on it.

I also don’t see how a paid service is antithetical (nice word btw, never heard it before) to privacy > yes Kagi might be able to link all searches to each account (I didn’t do too much research on how they implemented it) but that doesn’t mean that its not possible to implement it in a way were they wouldn’t be able to do that.

So yea, critical thinking and discussion GoGoGo but “you’re wrong, I’m right lol”(obviously made up but some comments here (meaning this community not just this post) give me that feeling) is none of that