This. No matter how tricky the logic is, there's literally no reason to run that code on DDG server's and throw in a remote connection. What the hell?

That's not fair. There is a very clear reason: it simplifies development for them and avoids duplicating functionality in two different codebases. You can argue about whether or not that's a good trade-off given the privacy implications (and I would agree that it's not) but you can't claim that there is "literally no reason".