This sounds like AdGuard Home is an example?

Yep this is is what I started doing for my kid’s favourite parent-appproved YouTube channels when the dedicated YouTube Kids TVOs app got discontinued. Everybody is better off.

As a compromise to not contribute to stat gathering could one not use newsgroups?

It’s like picking an airline. No matter who you choose somebody has a story of how they’re varying degrees of awful.

I’m on Proton. I disliked when that one guy made that social post comment about how Republicans are easier to deal with. I’m not offended enough to roll the dice with another provider only to later discover they’re literal nazis, their founder has Epstein connections or they discriminate against trans people.

(Which is to say, if you want to switch from Mullvad I get it.)