Data removal services?

They'll all work to a degree. There's others like Optery, Kanary, etc. The problem is removals generally aren't permanent. At some point your information will be readded/index from whatever sources they got it from to begin with. That's why they're subscription services.

If you're from a place with privacy laws with some teeth (E.g. USA, CA), removals are a lot more effective, semi permanent.

You can do most of it yourself for free, working through a data broker opt out list like this one: https://inteltechniques.com/workbook.html

And then sign up for a free trial of Optery or Kanary to snipe some of the stragglers//ones giving you trouble.

If you're technically savvy, you can use a residential IP proxy to pretend you're from a state with privacy laws.

Some of the sites make profile searching a major pain in the ass. They drag it out for several minutes and try to upsell you at the end (or grab your email before giving you the results). There's usually a few ways around that. Some offer a phone book like lookup, where you select the first letter(s) of the last name you want to lookup, followed by several sub pages where you select the rest of the name + first name. Or something like that.

E.g. https://www.spokeo.com/people/S0001

Other way is to Google "site:<base domain> <Common Name>". This usually surfaces a url you can then edit to your name/location.

E.g. https://www.spokeo.com/John-Smith/California

I've looked into getting one of those service a few years back and ultimately decided not to use them.

Those compagnies juste send mass emails on pour behalf to every databroker and companies that they can. Those emails necessarily contain your definitely correct information (full name, email, adress) to check against their database.
I feel this does more harm than good. You get law abiding compagnies to delete you at the cost of sending out your info to everyone.
Also, compagnies have to keep a record of the request, so there is now a permanent record of your info in every compagnie imaginable (even those that comply). (And email is not very secure).
And you broadcast to everyone that you value your privacy, making you a very juicy target.

I concluded that I'm much better off doing it myself, or poison the data by giving fake info into my account.

It may seem drastic, but the low effort way to have ok privacy would be to periodically change phone number (and redo all your accounts).

Not saying you should abandon trying to acheive privacy, but have resonable expectation, and i think incognito and deleteme type compagnies are mostly privacy theater.