It could be that it's a hit piece concocted by the secretive privacy cabal, still working at their evil plan to hurt people by making them control their private information and at the same time to inconvenience powerful corporations from doing whatever they want.
There is no privacy cabal that you sarcastically suggest, but there is a lot of money to be made out of paranoia, justified or not. Protonmails worthless encryption, the dubiously safe vpn ads I see everywhere. I tend to see a lot of exaggerations from some privacy oriented companies. I still trust those companies far more, and a sizable portion doesnt try to spread fear and exaggeration, though, but I do believe that a lot of companies are trying to make a ton of money off of paranoia they help create.
Protonmail advertises special end to end encryption thats only available when sending emails to other protonmail users. Others get the standard TLS that every provider uses. Recently they added a feature convert emails a link to a page that asks the non-protonmail user for a password (not a private key or login) and then decrypts the email in the browser, which I find pretty worthless.
