I remember, “back in the days” there was an extension that scraped a list of open proxies by country and then used one of those proxies based on the URL. So what you described was/is possible. Nowadays I’m lazy and have nothing like this set up anymore.

There also is a problem with open proxies: They could be extremely slow or not working at all but being listed as fast and online so any type of automatism would select them.

You also never know who’s running them. If you host a proxy or VPN overseas and use this one you at least have some control over what it does. The speed might also be better.

I guess it just boils down to how much money you’re willing to pay.

The problem with Tor is, that it is very slow because how it works. You also have zero control over the exit node. It could be run by a malicious actor scraping all your data and sending back false information. Tor is good for poking though government firewalls but not for security, so careful when entering confidential or personal data.