Mullvad was the darling of the Vpn world, up until they removed support for Port forwarding. Would be really curious to see if their subscriber numbers have tanked since then.
It seems the people this most affected were the ones using VPNs primarily for torrenting, which I've always just used a VPS or dedicated server for. Though, even in that case, it's not like it's impossible to torrent without port forwarding, millions of people do it every day behind their NAT.
It is unfortunate they had to remove the feature, but I have to assume the abuse of the feature was at the level where it was threatening the service as a whole, if I had to choose between Mullvad without port forwarding or no Mullvad at all, I'd obviously choose the former. They also do seem to be refunding people who request it, so it doesn't really seem like any kind of "rug pull" or anything.
For two peers to connect, at least one needs to be reachable by the other. Behind a VPN that requires port forwarding, so if you don't have it you rely entirely on peers that are reachable.
It did change though, I’ve been using them since they started but in the past 2ish years their network is very bad, slow, continuous interruptions and disconnects (can’t say it correlates but noticed happened around the time Mozilla VPN started as they use the mullvad backbone), blocked in a lot of regions even in some government websites, anong other issues, the straw was when they stopped port forwarding.
As for IP blocking, I've also rarely encountered that, when I do it's mostly on e-commerce sites, and in those cases I typically find it's just a single exit IP that's blocked and setting up a rule for that domain to tunnel the traffic to a different server (via their SOCKS5 endpoints) fixes it. I can understand how having to do that might be an annoyance to some people, but again for me it's not really a big deal, just a few occasional minor inconveniences in an otherwise good product.
Edit: I should also say I don't really use any services like Netflix or things like that, it's my understanding that streaming sites like that almost universally block Mullvad since they make no effort to mask that their IPs are from datacenters. Again, not an issue for me, but I definitely could understand if that was a deal breaker for some.
Anyway, I've been a customer for a long time, and will continue to be.
Very much still are.