they don’t “plant trees” but rather contribute very little amounts to existing programmes
Ofcourse they don't plant trees themselves, it's a search engine with a small team. They donate their entire profit which averages upwards of a million euros every month, to local tree planting initiatives across the world and that isn't a 'little' number at all.
“Every search plants a tree” is a lie. It’s not every search, but rather every couple clicks on an ad
I agree, they were 'a bit' misleading with that in the past. Although they did state in their tree counter earlier and somewhere in their website/blog that it was roughly 45 searches (in Germany, depends on region) which raised enough money to plant a tree. They've since removed most, if not all of the misinformation.
They use Bing results making them useless
Since when does using Bing results make a search engine a 'scam'? DuckDuckGo also uses Bing results, would you call that a scam as well? Ecosia uses Bing search results because it's close to impossible to make an independent search engine which gives satisfactory results without the resources of a tech giant.
There's Revolt (FOSS, functionally the same as Discord but it's centralised) and Matrix (FOSS and decentralised but it's somewhat functionally different than discord). Both have their pros and cons. You can look into them.