Seems the indie VPNs and web hosts run circles around their counterparts in a PE portfolio. The PEs have dozens of competing services, each of them used to be diverse, but they join the hive of stagnation, cost cutting and price hikes. Seen one of them refusing to implement Wireguard, getting shut down and customers transferred to a sister product.

Yes.

AFAIK they don't buy residential Internet addresses and so you're likely to be blocked using them.

That's the only downside as far as I can tell.

For "mainstream" VPN's...probably. But it's still blocked by a lot of servers, so you get apps/websites that won't load or have degraded service -- and often inconsistently, so it's confusing that the Google Maps app kind of works, but not really.

Historically I've had more luck using a VPS in some datacenter and running my own VPN on it. It tends to get blocked by fewer services, but some still have those datacenter IP's blocked as well. Sometimes need to try a few different providers to find one that works well.

You do miss out on some of the anonymization via "hiding in the herd" with this method, but anything that aggregates traffic like that gets blocked by a lot of services fairly quickly.