But it does matter to a lot of people, which I think is the thing.
There will absolutely be people who are willing to sacrifice some ease-of-use in the name of additional privacy, but it seems that those people are in the minority, and that means that Google (or whomever) needs to provide 99/99 when everyone else is only 90/90, if they want to continue being market leaders.
Imagine some alternate reality where Bing were the dominant search engine (or look at real world cases like Russia, where Yandex dominates), do you think that Google's marginally superior results would be enough to make users switch?
I propose that Google reached a market-leading position early on by being pretty good when other search engines were pretty bad. Since then, they've become the "default" option, and people will keep using what they're accustomed to.
There will absolutely be people who are willing to sacrifice some ease-of-use in the name of additional privacy, but it seems that those people are in the minority, and that means that Google (or whomever) needs to provide 99/99 when everyone else is only 90/90, if they want to continue being market leaders.