I haven’t noticed any issues with a 1080 using i3, so this definitely seems like a KDE issue. Are you getting desktop notifications when it goes black?

Yes! Definitely was Kagi. Not sure why I remembered $12 instead of $10.

I’ve been pretty happy with DuckDuckGo. Some people have made the switch to using a search engine aggregate thing like SearXNG. And then there’s the one $12/month search engine I’ve heard people talk fondly of that I can’t remember the name of.