Am I wrong to be skeptical?
Edit: oh apparently I’m wrong to even suggest something we have other examples of
> I lost a lot of faith in Proton when I learned how much funding they took from the EU.
Unless the origins of the money are unethical (e.g. blood money), it's not where it comes from that matters, it's what's done with it. I haven't seen any misconduct from ProtonMail and the EU's motivations for giving the money seem to be economic, which makes a lot of sense. They want competitive EU tech companies.
> It just runs entirely counter to evidence we’ve seen of Snowden, 5eyes/14eyes, and other programs that the EU truly wants end to end encrypted comms for people.
The EU is not a member of the 5 eyes nor 14 eyes, some of its member states are. The EU is composed of 28 member states, so not even half are participants in those groups.
Even if the EU were a member of the 5 eyes, the EU is not a monolithic entity. The SIGINT arm of the EU (if such a thing exists) may very well oppose end to end encryption while the economic arm promotes it. The same is true in the US, where the NSA attempts to break encryption while the Department of State funds Tor development.
The way I think of the privacy ecosystem is that it makes dragnet surveillance much harder and it provides some protection if the government has specifically targeted you for data collection. So, companies/products like ProtonMail and ProtonVPN are good things. But, creating something that is 100% safe for the individual is impossible (or at best so impractical to be untenable).
The EU is one of the most privacy-conscious government entities on Earth right now, and it needs to be noted that ProtonMail is located entirely within Switzerland, an even more privacy-conscious state that is not a member of the EU.
There is no extra safe guards to encrypted email that lives on a server the more users you add. It doesn't matter. It was a point to point transfer once. All emails are SSL/TLS sent anyhow.
TOR is a different thing. It's active user browsing. If only US spies (example) used TOR, it would be pretty damn obvious what they were doing or at least show that this was vital traffic to inercept. But add in millions of normal users and it's much easier to keep your nefarious deeds hidden by just blending in with the crowd.