I don’t know about OP but when I use a VPN, it’s on all the time, not selectively enabled because I’m going to a particular website.

The only time I’ve had any kind of crash was when I did a major KDE update while in KDE, but even then it consisted of the shell crashing and reloading itself. Which I took as a sign that I should restart KDE.

I was sick of paying the “Australia tax” for new releases that took longer to reach us than most of the rest of the world.

Exactly this, except I actually stopped for a long time when Netflix first came out and wasn’t geo-restricted… then the enshittification started.