I’ve certainly found it frustrating that these alternate search engines don’t always cater for geographic location, so if I’m looking for a product I get results that are US-centric versus retailers based near me. Google does do a good job of knowing what’s relevant to you based on your history and location. I’ve tried DuckDuckGo and Brave so far and both have routinely ended in my needing to jump to google on occasion.

Maybe that ends up being the solution, only use Google when you can’t find it elsewhere so at least they’re only getting 10% of your search history…

This doesn’t really apply if you’re port forwarding to a specific device. In that case you know that you have told your firewall to forward port 80 & 443 (for example) to your web server and you know what ports that has open. I would not be using UPNP on the other hand as that seems dangerous especially in the IOT era.

Keep in mind you can always use a different DNS provider who does support dynamic dns. For example you could use cloudflare (free) with a domain bought from Pork Bun.