In my experience, transcoding with subtitles becomes an issue when the subtitles are burned in to the video. I often get external subtitles from https://www.opensubtitles.org and then stick the downloaded SRT file in the same folder as the movie. Make sure it has the exact same file name as the movie so jellyfin will associate the two together. Once I do that, it does not transcode at least for subtitle reasons.

Subjective

At least you can still self host Ghost websites. My personal website is a ghost site, running in docker on my home lab.

Forget their reasoning, the fact that they can block access at all should be reason enough for anyone to abandon them. Glad I abandoned my lifetime membership years ago.

Second proton, I use my own domain with it. Works great!