One other issue I had with Mullvad that put the nail in the coffin for me was randomly laggy DNS resolvers, they would get fixed just by the time I start investigating it, but it kept happening... I say this as a mostly happy user for probably 7 years, but then found myself having to turn it off more than on to be able to access most sites.
> where every single server in a country would receive infinite re-captcha.
What does that even mean? Have you also disabled cookies?
Typically it's a Cloudflare captcha if you're doing that, not a re-captcha. And afaik pretty much everyone gets this treatment with zero history. Welcome to the modern web.
Cloudflare recently started holding stackoverflow hostage as well. "Weird" OS + "weird" browser + cookie autodelete = www is hell, even on clearnet. I hate cloudflare so much it's unreal, including everyone who works for them, for enabling this nonsense.
I'm assuming it has something to do with the push in recent years to expand their userbase, but they don't seem to be able to keep a clean enough pool of IPs like the big popular ones to cope. I know all VPNs struggle with this but it was getting ridiculous, where every single server in a country would receive infinite re-captcha.