This feels a bit like the Dropbox comment. Sure, open source tools exist that enable you to do things yourself. However there’s a large market for less-technical people (prosumers) who might pay for a lot of that complexity to be simplified.
I feel like people really need to think about who they’re trying to be private from before signing up for VPN’s.
with a VPS as your vpn, reddit/google/facebook/whatever all see you from a single ip, one that might change even less then your ISP's, all of your alternative accounts will all share this ip as well, and 0 other people use that ip address. basically data collection and alternative account identification becomes dead simple because your ip is basically your universal id.
you stand out as an individual, part of the "security" with things like mullvad is that you share that ip
security in depth of course, fingerprinting and stuff still exist, but if you have such a clearly unique ip address you have 0 chance
Also your local network, like you need to use your phone's WiFi because you don't get a good cell signal at work, but you don't want your employer seeing your personal phone activity. Same as public coffeeshops.
Do you understand the privacy argument now?
I'm just saying there are workarounds that mean we don't have to be beholden to the Mullvads of the world if they drop this feature. I think we're basically one good blog post away from a situation where most people who need port forwarding can set it up themselves via ec2. If they prefer VPNs, and can find some that do port forwarding, more power to them.