Mullvad has genuinely resisted government data requests in ways that matter and that’s not nothing. But the premise that it’s uniquely proven in a way alternatives aren’t just isn’t true and is doing a lot of heavy lifting. IVPN and Proton have both faced and resisted comparable legal pressure. The gap between Mullvad’s tested track record and alternatives isn’t as wide as your steel grade analogy implies, and that analogy only holds if you’re treating the alternatives as unverified claims with no real world data behind them.

But if we’re discussing harm, the deeper problem is the framing that ethics are a luxury position for people who aren’t in genuine danger. By that logic you can never apply moral considerations to any purchase of critical infrastructure when the stakes are high enough, which produces conclusions that don’t hold up under pressure. The gun in a war zone analogy assumes the gun manufacturer’s politics don’t affect the people in the war zone. But the people most likely to need a VPN to survive, dissidents, journalists, immigrants, minorities in authoritarian or ethnonationalist environments, are often the exact same people being targeted by the policies the Mullvad founder is bankrolling. A Somali refugee using Mullvad to stay safe is funding, through that subscription, a party that wants to forcibly deport them back to Somalia regardless of whether they were born in Sweden.

So no, I don’t think pointing this out is harmful. I think pretending it’s irrelevant because the product works well is the more harmful position, especially for the people most likely to be using it for the reasons you’re describing.