If encryption is a must, then use Tuta. German company, privacy focused, open source all around, no surveillance, free tier with encryption available, encrypted calendars, accessible paid subscriptions with actually useful services.
Keep a proton for situations where you can actually use the encryption. Most of the time the encryption is as useless as a VPN.
Also keep in mind all it is is pgp with a directory lookup. I think proton made their pgp directory lookup more open in the last few years, so it may not have any real benefits.
This is common debate and there's plenty of angles to it. VPN companies are definitely guilty of fear mongering in their advertising and trying to market them as an easy way to achieve privacy or anonymity, which is false. Tom Scott's video covers this well. This overview is also pretty good at explaining what it is and isn't. If you don't trust your ISP or are using public/free wifi, VPNs can be useful. VPNs aren't inherently trustworthy either, though, especially free ones that might be harvesting your data. Even a well-intentioned VPN that doesn't retain logs can rent servers that government entities can (theoretically) bug to get your data (if they really wanted to).
Almost every site is https, so it's already encrypted. DNS lookups are encrypted. So what a VPN does is prevents your isp from knowing you visited a specific website. There was already no way for them to know what you got from that website, the only additional security was knowing you visited.
If this is a concern, a VPN isn't useless, but for most that isn't a concern.
VPNs are also good for torrents and bypassing rate limiting.
It’s not encrypted. You can’t compare that to Proton or Tuta.
I didn't compare it to them. Besides, what good are they when no one I'm communicating with uses encryption? Unless you actually have people who are willing to use the same provider you do, or do the PGP thing to encrypt/decrypt it themselves, Proton and Tuta are no better than any others in that regard.
Besides, what good are they when no one I'm communicating with uses encryption?
I'm talking about your email inbox being stored in an encrypted format on the provider's server. This is what Proton and Tuta do. They encrypt all incoming Emails with your PGP public key before storing them in your inbox.
What you are talking about is different, and it doesn't need to be supported by the provider. You can always manually encrypt outgoing messages, no matter which provider you use. These are not the same things though.