> and throughput overall is pretty shit with so many layers of unoptimized linux piled ontop of hardware that was never optimized to handle this type of packet generation and mangling
That's a very broad generalization. I use a https://pcengines.ch/ based router with openwrt and mullvad as my VPN and performance is very close to non-vpn traffic.
Sure, if you run your VPN on bad hardware you might get bad performance but that is not true for everyone.
