DuckDuckGo's bang redirects are too slow. Add the following URL as a custom search engine to your browser. Enables all of DuckDuckGo's bangs to work, but much faster.
https://unducked.vercel.app/?q=%s
DuckDuckGo does their redirects server side. Their DNS is...not always great. Result is that it often takes ages.
I solved this by doing all of the work client side. Once you've went to https://unducked.vercel.app/ once, the JS is all cache'd and will never need to be downloaded again. Your device does the redirects, not me.