As a 10+ year paying Mullvad customer, it hasn't changed my experience using the product at all, and I recently deposited another years worth of credit. While I did occasionally use port forwarding, it certainly wasn't a "must have feature" for me. I mostly found it useful for temporarily exposing services publicly, but there are plenty of alternatives that accomplish the same thing these days. The only Mullvad unique-ish feature (I believe some other VPNs offer something similar) I use regularly is their SOCKS5 endpoints, it's very convenient to be able to connect to any of their exit nodes from any server. Otherwise I mostly just want a bog standard Wireguard VPN.
It seems the people this most affected were the ones using VPNs primarily for torrenting, which I've always just used a VPS or dedicated server for. Though, even in that case, it's not like it's impossible to torrent without port forwarding, millions of people do it every day behind their NAT.
It is unfortunate they had to remove the feature, but I have to assume the abuse of the feature was at the level where it was threatening the service as a whole, if I had to choose between Mullvad without port forwarding or no Mullvad at all, I'd obviously choose the former. They also do seem to be refunding people who request it, so it doesn't really seem like any kind of "rug pull" or anything.
> it hasn't changed my experience using the product at all
It did change though, I’ve been using them since they started but in the past 2ish years their network is very bad, slow, continuous interruptions and disconnects (can’t say it correlates but noticed happened around the time Mozilla VPN started as they use the mullvad backbone), blocked in a lot of regions even in some government websites, anong other issues, the straw was when they stopped port forwarding.
I personally haven't experienced many of those issues. I also don't use their first party client though, just standalone Wireguard, so I can't speak to the quality of that. The only time I've had connection issues really is when they completely decommission a server, since I'm using static configs, I have to manually go in and update the server IP, but that's not really a big issue for me and is fairly rare. My experience has actually been that the servers I tend to use are quite a bit faster than they were in the past, I imagine since they've been making an effort to upgrade everything to 10gbit+.
As for IP blocking, I've also rarely encountered that, when I do it's mostly on e-commerce sites, and in those cases I typically find it's just a single exit IP that's blocked and setting up a rule for that domain to tunnel the traffic to a different server (via their SOCKS5 endpoints) fixes it. I can understand how having to do that might be an annoyance to some people, but again for me it's not really a big deal, just a few occasional minor inconveniences in an otherwise good product.
Edit: I should also say I don't really use any services like Netflix or things like that, it's my understanding that streaming sites like that almost universally block Mullvad since they make no effort to mask that their IPs are from datacenters. Again, not an issue for me, but I definitely could understand if that was a deal breaker for some.
It seems to be a widespread misconception amongst commercial VPN users that port forwarding is required for torrents to work. While port forwarding can be beneficial in certain situations, as you said, it's certainly not a requirement, especially for well seeded torrents like I'm sure the large majority of people are downloading.
You don't necessarily need port forwarding to torrent, but if everyone was behind a VPN without port forwarding the network wouldn't work.
For two peers to connect, at least one needs to be reachable by the other. Behind a VPN that requires port forwarding, so if you don't have it you rely entirely on peers that are reachable.
Your client connects to them after discovering them, they indicate interest, then you start sending data. A bittorrent connection, once opened, is a two-way street.
It seems the people this most affected were the ones using VPNs primarily for torrenting, which I've always just used a VPS or dedicated server for. Though, even in that case, it's not like it's impossible to torrent without port forwarding, millions of people do it every day behind their NAT.
It is unfortunate they had to remove the feature, but I have to assume the abuse of the feature was at the level where it was threatening the service as a whole, if I had to choose between Mullvad without port forwarding or no Mullvad at all, I'd obviously choose the former. They also do seem to be refunding people who request it, so it doesn't really seem like any kind of "rug pull" or anything.