I’ve been running Home Assistant (HAOS) on Proxmox for years with no issues. It doesn’t need to be on bare metal. VMs work fine.

They collect them. And when they have enough they can trade them in for a large stuffed animal.

I’m using Mullvad at the moment as well and looking to change for the same reason. I’ve been looking at switching to AirVPN once all my credit runs out on Mullvad. They have a similar model to Mullvad, but they allow port forwarding.