What others are doing doesn't matter, that's whataboutism. Yes there's many shittier services, and Proton is much better than them.

What matters is if you can trust Proton to be private, and the answer is... mostly.

Yes I like Proton and I use Proton as my daily email driver, because I don't expect privacy from governments, I just don't want Google tracking.

But a lot of people see the "no logs" thing and think that there's never any logs, which is not true, they add them on request, and they've done it based on foreign government requests, for questionable searches, as I've linked above.

If you want privacy in your hands, use Tor when accessing Proton and pay in crypto obviously.

Those are techniques needed for privacy because they can access that data and you can't trust them to safeguard any data they can access because they legally can't.

It's not their fault, it's just the system, but you must expect it.