You're being downvoted because people believe in propaganda being pushed by competitors, but ProtonVPN / ProtonMail are very good options. Plenty of links and reports by Mozilla in this thread will lend credence to that.
but was conveniently never denied by PIA that I could ever find. If it was a lie, it would be easy for them (PIA) to prove under libel laws in the discovery phase of a trial. I'd argue if it was a lie from ProtonVPN, it would have been in PIA's best interests to clear their name. After all, PIA and ProtonVPN are a few of the only providers who've proven in courts they don't have logs of users. We know they're legit because they said so in court under penalty of perjury. Also, the European Commission has investigated these exact claims, and would have privileged access to a lot of the business documents, and found the claims without merit.
Me? Just a happy protonvpn user who finds the oft repeated shilling for PIA dull. If you really want to hate protonvpn, use PIA, or use someone else. Better, don't trust any of them! Setup algo on a digital ocean droplet of your own: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
However, this is meant for running over an untrusted network, not for maintaining internet anonymity. Use Tor for that.