With Mullvad disabling port forwarding and the general problematic VPN services it was super helpful to rely on some information about VPNs on reddit to discovered services like Mullvad. Now it seems to be down to ProtonVPN, AirVPN and IVPN. But that information is not to be found here so far.
And then there is the whole world of seedboxes unbeknownst to me, especially regarding practical anonymity with payment processors.
A thread on the old bad place mentioned Windscribe, which I’ve been using. They currently offer static IPs and port forwarding.
Split-tunneling has worked well in routing certain programs (qBit, flaresolverr, Firefox, etc) and then I keep Plex on the non-VPN network (I’m not using port-forwarding, personally).