In fact this was one of the key features lauded about DDG in its early days, the “instant result”-boxes.

Google kinda only went hard on them afterwards, probably seeing a good idea over at DDG because for the vast majority of people, they’re looking for answers and results, not specifically objects of type link-to-search-result. They don’t need a list of links, so long as the information they were after is reliably in those generated cards.

See OP wanting an IMDB link, which is directly there as Google correctly assumed that’s a very very very common use case for googling the name of a movie.