At the same time, Proton makes paying anonymously difficult. If you want to pay with Monero they don't officially support it and you have to go through a third party and buy a gift card, which is also not documented on their website, or exchange Monero for Bitcoin and pay with that. Contrast with IVPN/AirVPN/Mullvad which all officially support Monero. Also looking at their payment page, if you do pay with credit card they automatically renew by default, thus storing your credit card information without making that clear. Contrast with IVPN which doesn't by default and clarifies the privacy drawbacks, and Mullvad which doesn't do that at all. Sure the activist shouldn't have used a credit card, but at the same time Proton aggressively markets themselves as a privacy service so they need to act like one instead of encouraging bad privacy practices because subscriptions are profitable.

It is for people who want to not get arrested, especially when the alternatives don't have the same level of neglect that Proton does (and some of them have a proven track record of not leaking information). IVPN and AirVPN at least accept Monero so I'd trust them more

Interesting. I'll read up in that.

Also: check your permissions to prevent possible rights escalations. (And yes, I know that it relies more on the sudoers file but I am sure there is some attack surface there ...)

You're pretty vague for a "non-zombie". What's the issue with being an email provider? Also, they have an AI chatbot, I'm not sure they're training any models, and I don't know of any issue they've had with that product. Lastly, define them being a "dodgy" company.