I'm hosting my own instance and I love it. Import from several recipe-sharing sites works very well. Import from Instagram would be great, but Meta tries to make this as hard as possible.
Just click on the settings icon on any SearXNG instance. You will see a list of search engines with checkboxes to enable them and the bang notation you can add to your query to limit a search to just this engine.
My suggestion would be: try to get used to it, it's really worth it.
It clearly states what it is and it stays in its own community. I don't see a problem here.