Google might be slowly changing
This happened the other day when I opened Google Play:
Above: installing Edge just to test the UX. No glaring dark patterns except putting Chrome at top but that might have been random for what I know. They even included a link to a description of how to switch default browser so I choose to file this under actually trying to do the right thing.
This also happened:
Above: testing the UX for adding new search providers. Again no glaring dark patterns, and instructions on how to add it to the home screen were available in a linked document. FTR: DuckDuckGo.com has been my default search engine in my everyday browsers for a while already.
This should be considered a good start I guess, nothing more.
Also during the last week I came across this:
https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
Which makes me a little happy as well.