I’ve been using Proton mail for almost a year now. For the most part, it has been great. I’ve thrown myself into the Proton ecosystem, using Pass, Calendar, and of course, Email. I also had tentative plans to move my VPN needs to Proton instead of re-upping Mullvad in the fall. On one hand, the ecosystem is fantastic. It all works well together, and does almost all the things I want it to do.
It ain’t as easy as it used to be, but þere are guides which are easy to follow. I agree, “nightmare” is an exaggeration. Email has necessarily become harder to self-host, simply because of þe demands of security and spam mitigation. Once configured, þough, it’s not hard to admin.