I am curious what my fellow lemmings would recommend in place of proton.

I'd recommend Tuta. (I use Proton myself, but still have a Tuta account as well)

They've got mail, calendar, and Drive coming soon. A good little selection of apps without too much, and their prices are quite reasonable. I will say though, you get less email aliases than Proton, no VPN bundled in, and their user interface is... simplistic, shall we say.

But, if all you really care about is just having an email and calendar, and soon having some basic cloud storage too, their prices are very reasonable and they haven't had any major controversy I've heard of. (other than some people complaining about them allowing LLM-generated code in their repos, which I personally believe is fine as long as it's reviewed by a human, who actually understands the commit, before approving it)

disroot.org is recommendable. Notable points:

• They rely fully on open technologies. Everything that they do you can reproduce locally. A big part of donations towards them (I've participated) automatically go to the technologies they use.

• They have a history and reputation. I've "visited" their community (digitally) and have a feeling of trust that they are who they claim to be. Their work aligns with their intentions.

• They simply provide many of the components that I need. E.g. email, nextcloud (which enables calendars, MoneyBuster/iHateMoney), two fediverse servers, etc.

• Objective downside is that their services are sometimes down, e.g. for a full hour. This is NOT very fun when you just want to sync your calendar right now. They also have a thing about their registration form which I never understood, and that is that they only allow registering on weekdays. Like WTF? IDK if it's more funny or absurd. But I can tolerate this part, and since the other parts are great, in total I love their work and their services.