I fully realize OP isn’t trying to start a phone war, but there seems to be a few misconceptions in his original post, like hinting on something that do not exist in Android Auto when in fact AA has many of those features built in, that make me cringe a little. I just feel it would be nice if some of the factual info can be corrected…
One vote for Mullvad. Like you I moved from Surfshark but that was a year ago. Never looked back.
There is a server list page on Mullvad to let you see the bandwidth of each server they have in each country. Take a look and pick the faster ones if necessary (they have all been ok for me fast or slow when I stream).
Note however I don’t have Netflix account etc. I stream from a “members only” IPTV service.