The ones I use and suggest are ProtonVPN and Windscribe. Windscribe is free (with a limit of 10gb/month) with paid versions and is open source, it's one of the only trusted free VPNs. ProtonVPN is free and unlimited but you can't choose location. If you're willing to pay, MullvadVPN is, from what I hear, the best of the best. I don't believe any of these are blocked in North Macedonia, so you should be able to download them.
The more people switch from Chromium browsers, the less money they get! The more people switch from Google services, the better. Remember that they get money from us using their services.
TL;DR, Proton was demanded to hand over the information that they had on someone to the Spanish authorities. They complied and gave them all the information they had: a recovery email address.
If you have evidence of your claims, please share them, as Proton is a widely used email, but you can't make these sorts of claims without evidence.
I agree to not be using something that comes from Chrome, but Chromium is open-source, so it's not like it's actively benefiting Google, right? (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
Having exit nodes for their VPN is not the same as collaborating with the government. There is no evidence that the Israeli government has access to any of their information, their servers are hosted in Switzerland.
I hear about a book that sounds interesting (searching or talking to friends for recommendations), and put that next on my list. My next is Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
A great thing about the Proton "ecosystem" is that it is not like Google where you need an account to access docs (or VPN on mobile!), though I agree that centralisation isn't the best thing for tech nerds like us. That's why I prefer to just use ProtonMail and VPN, and leave the other stuff like drives and password managers to other open-source projects.
(Also, having an ecosystem may be good for those who refuse to put in as much effort as us, or those who simply do not understand as much as we do. I personally don't support centralisation, but there's a reason that non-tech nerds often do.)
No more privacy! Everyone knows everything about everyone everywhere! Woooo!