Brave seem to be in a decent position as an alternative though you can still find a bunch of SERPs where their stuff is identical to Google's or very close. Likely that historical cliqz data which is maybe guised as their web discovery project. Remember Bing getting slapped down for that kind of cloning 2010ish although their scraping was more blatant.
Still no known crawler and going about using Googlebot robots.txt rules using browser UAs. And selling content under AI services...
I still like them more than DDG just being a Bing wrapper though. DDG seem to have more market share for now but at least Brave are showing some innovation.
Agree that voting is going to be riddled with bots. Surely having some kind of social network to weight the votes, as people/groups would marginalise the bot stuff- though there'd likely be another evolution of gaming to that.
/tangent
I've been using Brave browser for watching youtube, works a charm for avoiding ads. I used to avoid ad blockers knowing that it's a lifeline for independent sites but some are unusable without one, and G make plenty money so...