Bottom line: There's no "middle ground", any middle ground you cede is allowing a third party some kind of access. Hosting your own email has become expensive and time-consuming (although IMHO it's still extremely worthwhile, and I do it in spite of what a pain in the ass it is). Be prepared to spend at least $50/mo and at least 6 hours in setup and 1-2 hours a month debugging if you do it personally. Or you can find someone to help (see below). You need your own IP address. You need a dedicated box, not a VPS. And check the IP address in advance to make sure it's clean, and not blacklisted. Tell the datacenter you're going to be doing email and ask them if they're okay with that for a clean IP. Use https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx to test the IP address they're offering you, or IPs in their range. Unlike some people are saying, you should never do this off a VPS if you have an interest in keeping the email secure and functioning for a long time.
My personal go-to would be dedicated hosting in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Isle of Man or Norway. Clean IPs, your own box, start with a clean server. But then you're talking $250/mo or so.
If you don't know how to set it up, there are people who can do it for you. You will need to essentially trust that person with access to all your correspondence, but if they do it properly, no one at the server farm[0] or elsewhere will have access to your correspondence... which puts you in the 0.01% of people on earth whose email isn't read by big tech companies.
[0] -who doesn't physically access the server: Look for ones in cages and ask who has physical access and why.