Google scholar is fine. There's little opportunity for them to enshittify since it's quite easy to construct a journal crawler and there really can't be that much revenue from people searching for these highly esoteric topics.
And, the people you'd be pissing off would be the ones that are capable of creating a competitor, and there's already competitors.
Perplexity.ai, a general purpose search engine with AI, has an academic setting that leverages Semantic Scholar...but I think going to SS is just better. If you're looking for article by a particular scholar—I like content written by Patricia Roberts-Miller—then Perplexity.ai is a good bet.
@TwoGems my business partner just turned me on to www.researchrooster.ai he says it is very helpful for uncovering webs of papers that cite each other and tracking new publication