Excerpts from your third link https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-giving-up-activists-data/

As usual, the devil is in the details—ProtonMail’s original policy simply said that the service does not keep IP logs “by default.” However, as a Swiss company, ProtonMail was obliged to comply with a Swiss court’s demand that it begin logging IP address and browser fingerprint information for a particular ProtonMail account.

According to multiple statements ProtonMail issued on Monday, it was unable to appeal the Swiss demand for IP logging on that account. The service could not appeal both because a Swiss law had actually been broken and because “legal tools for serious crimes” were used—tools that ProtonMail believes were not appropriate to the case at hand, but which it was legally require to comply with.

ProtonMail also operates a VPN service called ProtonVPN, and it points out that Swiss law prohibits the country’s courts from compelling a VPN service to log IP addresses. In theory, if Youth for Climate had used ProtonVPN to access ProtonMail, the Swiss court could not have compelled the service to expose its “real” IP address.

Proton did not voluntarily log IPs, they were under a lawful court order and were out of appeal options.

Like I said, no one running a service will go to jail for you. None.

Not ProtonVPN, not Mullvad, not IVPN, not Lemmy Instances.

If a legal court order is received, they will conply after they run out of appeals

Imagine you run one of these services, and you received a lawful order in your jurisdiction.

You can choose to turn over data or go to jail for a long time.

Would you go to jail to protect user privacy?

That’s why its not only a company’s privacy practices you need to worry about, but also the jurisdiction. Choose a service that’s is in a privacy friendly jurisdiction.

Also, this is about Protonmail, which is under different laws than ProtonVPN.

That’s because no one running a service will go to jail for you. None.

Not ProtonVPN, not Mullvad, not IVPN, not Lemmy Instances.

Imagine you run one of these, and you received a lawful order in your jurisdiction.

Turn over data or go to jail for a long time.

Would you go to jail to protect user privacy?

The only thing Proton does better is because they are under Swiss Jurisdiction, which has stricter control over when a court order can be issued. But if a court order goes to Proton, they can’t ignore it.

Also: Protonmail =/= ProtonVPN, they are under different laws. In Switzerland, Mail providers have to provide IP addresses upon a subpoena, VPN providers do not. If those users had used ProtonVPN to access their Protonmail, they’d be safe.