It's disturbing that an alternative to Google is struggling. We need alternatives and even if Qwant is mostly Bing, it's still another choice.
The article is, I guess, based on a leak from a disgruntled person; or persons. They are most probably, and thus justifiably, concerned about the longer term strategy of Huawei here; a not untypical Chinese tactic at play here. Perhaps it's an Axel-Springer board member; especially as they own the publisher. It might be a call for another more palatable, to them, savior.
Their efforts to develop their own index would offer a real alternative and this is important for society and the economy. This article [0] dicusses those struggles saying “The technology developed worked super well on a few million indexed pages, but needed to be modified to operate on a larger scale,”. Certainly building an index for billions of pages and which operates fast is a big challenge we had to get over. There are many choices to make when designing, developing and deploying each of the three elements of a crawler, index and ranking engine. And those choices lead to big differences in SERPs: differences that are very distinct compared with what is offered between a search "engine" company and any of their syndication partners.
Self-disclosure: CEO of a search engine company
[0] http://www.wedemain.fr/dechiffrer/qwant-le-flop-de-lanti-goo...