Alpine's great. My entire homelab runs on it. Only complaint I have is its IPv6 support sucks. I have to hack together a bunch of scripts to get a reasonable network configuration.
I think their auto-scaling is somewhat broken currently. I set up auto-scaling with min=2 and max=6, and my VMs aren't scaling down from 3 to 2 even though there are 0 active connections on all the VMs.
Good news, you need less than $250. Just buy a Protectli appliance, install OPNSense on it with the wireguard plugin. Setup Mullvad config and route all traffic through the tunnel. That's it!
I've been running a similar setup for a couple years now. It's been great.