both xray and amneziawg selfhosted solutions are great enough to provide needed layer against new censorship mechanisms, i think you from russia, i have vpn for friends in this region, someone livee under white lists every day for 2 years, so we found a method to even resist “white lists” the trun proxy is great but still vulnerable to privacy, but work realy great, let’s kill their network together)

the good vpn is your vpn or from your trusted friends the much better when there are homelab solution than vps instead, so, sharing big thech links is not about privacy

yes it is, they manage dns using cloudflare, but not provide any dtata to them

for my server i use porkbun this cheap but relaible and my raspberry pi3b for small cloud servers, xmpp, wireguard, works nicely

just ask them and bring your device, so i did same when i was student, yes this is a shame to introduce young people with bloated software, governments also have benefits from advertising microslop, adobe, google etc. software solutions, so you can still use vnc protocol or ssh protocols if they leave you no choice