The Proton CEO thing was vastly overblown. He is a privacy advocate and expressed support for Trump's appointment for head of antitrust, as well as criticism of corporate Democrats who stand for big business which was misrepresented as a love of the Republican Party. The only mistake he made was to publish those statements using the official Proton account, which he later apologised for.

Some people, especially the American left, love to virtue signal and predictably they tried to cancel Proton as a result of this pretty minor and irrelevant social media drama. There were some good write-ups at the time which exposed how counterfactual the "pRoToN lOvEs mAgA" arguments were, but I guess feel free to skip over Proton if it really concerns you. It is objectively one of the best choices if you value both privacy and functionality (Proton still has support for port forwarding), which I think are far more relevant areas to be looking at when choosing a VPN for piracy.

Surfshark, cheap and fast.

I ended up self hosting my own in a privacy-friendly low-cost VPS after trying everything in some censorship heavy locations (SuperVPN, NordVPN, Mullvad, Surfshark, Frog{something}VPN ...) & rotating the address from time to time (I using a domain name so I don't have to change all the clients). My private one uses whatever new obfs protocol pops up and some other things to make fingerprinting very hard. Combining this with residential proxies & TOR+private bridges for browsing works like a charm EVERYWHERE.

Commercial VPNs all fail because they use standard protocols and are very easy to fingerprint if you try enough.

The eternal loop of looking for the Best vpn

Just go with Mullvad

I tried airvpn, but found it confusing in some regards. ProtonVPN is easier to use and it has served me well, despite the recent controversy around it. The only real annoyance is that it randomly selects a new port to forward every time you connect, so you have to manually update that in your client. Quantum is a nifty tool that will read your ProtonVPN logs and automatically complete this step for you, if you use qBittorrent.

Mullvad. I don't even think about alternatives.

If you aren't concerned with flashy setups, AirVPN might be something to check into. In terms of cost, 3 months of AirVPN cost roughly about the same as 1 month of PIA.

you might as well assume that any traffic you send to an american vpn is routed directly to the NSA, FBI, etc. get something that physically resides in a GDPR country. as for price, it's either that or just drop the P out of VPN

i use expressvpn with a dedicated uk server for streaming (as an anglophile) and mullvad wireguard on my gl ax1800 with port forwarding on the router for educational archival purposes and historical academic studies of long john silver and ive been happy.

i have been trying out windscribe paid but not sold on it

I’ve been happy with Windscribe, though I don’t really feel that knowledgeable. They had a case dismissed against them recently, that was suing them for evidence of a user’s activity. They couldn’t provide it because they didn’t keep logs, as advertised

I've been using ovpn.com for a few years. Port forwarding works perfectly for slskd and transmission/gluetun.

What you should also consider, do you need a VPN. If you just want to avoid region blocking, (any) will do. Just need to check if their IP range is blocked by the provider. For normal https traffic you don’t need one. Enable dns over https in your browser and your traffic is as secure and anonymous as with most commercial VPNs.
VPNs have their use cases but we now have a decade of scareware ads from VPNs that implied our traffic is as insecure as it was in 1980. but it isn’t, you’re paying for a lava insurance. And let me say this, you can still be tracked if you use a VPN. It’s just a bit harder, like marginally