I looked briefly at Protonmail this week like you mentioned and TBH invested several hours and pages of notes last year looking into encrypted providers like you mentioned today, the top ones, maybe a dozen of them.
I have not invested much time in it since. Frankly I have a lot of distrust in a lot of the corporate structure and tech today and like you -- with good reason sister.
well, Tutanota and Protonmail are known encrypted email providers. Tutanota is based in Germany and Protonmail I think is in Sweden. Using encrypted email makes a lot of sense actually. I've tried both, and they are pretty good.