I think between daiqo and the users at privacyguides the concerns you mention are well accounted for. To me, this from daiqo stood out as why AirVPN ends up being an easy choice for a lot of users.
“Additionally, there are not that many alternatives left. Mullvad is obviously the gold standard and IVPN follows, but both don’t have port-forwarding anymore. OVPN got acquired by Pango. Proton is a good alternative but not so viable for macOS users. There are a bunch of others but you’ll always need to compromise much more than with AirVPN.”