I confirm the symptoms happened for me as well. I used the !s bang to have startpage search it and startpage returned the image in the carousel and image results. I'm not certain I can continue to use duck duck go if it is going to give me results subjected to CCP censorship. I switched to it from Startpage as it had a less shady reputation than the latter, but Startpage hasn't messed with my actual searches like DDG…
Been using DDG for the past year the results are fairly poor and now they are licking CCP boot, ill have to start using startpage.