Now you go tell him that :-)
I have a self-hosted Nextcloud and my Nextcloud account connected via GNOME as an Online Account. It integrates seamlessly with Calendar, gives me a webdav mount for my files etc. I don’t have any issues. I have not added any Google accounts, and definitely no Microsoft accounts. I don’t use public clouds for private stuff.
Thank you for showing me SearXNG. I will definitely be looking into it, and once comfortable maybe even host one internally.