My recent changes towards more privacy friendlier life

robots.txt:

I have been researching searxng which I would love to host locally without opening ports to the internet but I don’t know if it’s possible

Yes, you need to set the SearXNG’s IP address to 127.0.0.1, which than resolves to localhost. After deployment, you can navigate to http://localhost:port, where port is the container port number you assigned SearXNG with.

robots.txt:

What I really dislike is that where the search engines are heading because it is almost impossible to find mini blogs who have researched / shared their opinion on matter x or any other useful websites.

Right, if you want to take matters into your own hands, you may want to use your own crawler and indexer, although you may discover that truly independent voices are few and far between.