On the contrary. Mullvad gives you more flexibility than PIA in that regard and doesn't limit you to whatever features are built into the client like PIA does. You can build tunnels to whatever endpoint in whichever country you want. You can associate multiple ports to your tunnel or separate tunnels for inbound connections. It's very convenient if you want a P2P tunnel where you can get a wireguard interface on the client and then configure your P2P application to only use that tunnel so that there's no chance of leaks (Up to you if you want to also configure the P2P service to use DNS over the VPN or just the system resolver if you don't care) and you don't have to tunnel everything over the same VPN. You can have multiple interfaces going to different applications if you wanted. You have the flexibility to configure your client in whatever way you want without having to deal with proprietary endpoints to request a temporary forwarded port for the connection like what PIA makes you use.

I used to use PIA before the owner hired con artist Mark Karpeles as the CTO and jumped ship when that happened. Even though I only picked Mullvad because it was recommended on HN and wasn't PIA, I much prefer it from a technical standpoint. If I knew how much better it was originally I never would have went for the cheaper more popular option of PIA. People shilling Mullvad are probably doing so because it has many technical advantages over traditional VPNs used by more casual customers. Mullvad also supports bridge servers for shadowsocks. I've never had an opportunity to test it but I'd expect Mullvad to be more reliable in China than PIA.

PIA is cheap, and they don't seem to keep traffic logs. That's basically all they have going for them.

Maybe things were already bad before Kape but it was around the same time