The only “other engine” that matters is really a thin paid SERP façade in front of a scraped Google result. In other words, Kagi pays for access to an API whose implementation is basically live scraping Google and throwing away the ads.
There are a few other indexes that Kagi’s aggregator mixes in (such as Bing Search) but those haven’t been contributing much in terms of meaningful results. The sheer size of Google’s index still dwarfs all the others, including Bing Search.
So yes, Kagi doesn’t scrape but they pay SERP providers who do.
Marginalia likely returns better results than Google, when it returns useful results. DDG/Bing likely returns average quality results which can be better than Google's slop results. It's not true that Google is the only useful one.