Yeah, I think that’s definitely one of the roadblocks Lemmy is facing at the moment. Even though I deleted my Reddit account after the API nonsense, I’m absolutely still appending every DDG or Startpage search with “reddit.” Especially with the flood of AI-generated garbage filling search results, it’s the easiest way to get quick answers from (probably) real people.
However, that also relates to Reddit’s other advantage, in that it actually has a decade and a half of content to be indexed in the first place. The magic of Reddit is that every question has been asked in every way at least 5 times over, Lemmy just doesn’t have that history yet.