Yeah, I don't think Proton would be my go-to choice for VPN when it comes to privacy. I've heard stuff about them actually keeping logs. In that case I'd be more interested in Mullvad since they just run their service on RAM. I did give the Proton VPN a spin, and at least as far as speeds go, it's pretty fast. They give you a notice if you use the "Secure Core" feature, stating that the connection speed might end up being a bit slow, but it still seems to reach the cap of my wifi (500mbit) so it honestly isn't that bad. So for streaming region locked stuff it seems to do the job. "Secure Core" as far as I can tell, just tunnels your connection through several nodes, I'm not well versed enough on networking to know how that could possibly improve security, because to me it sounds like adding more points of failure.

I do really like the email service and the password manager, and I'm sure I'll get some use from the drive as well at some point. When signing up for things, the password manager automatically suggests masking your email. Would've killed for something like that ten years ago; my gmail account is flooded with useless BS that it's nice to finally move away from it.