> Same company (no matter how hard they try to hide it)
Do you mean that NordVPN and ProtonVPN are the same 'spiritually' in that they're both companies selling a VPN for profit?
Or is there genuinely some business connection between them that I've missed?
I think that BLUF is definitely the better way of writing most informational pieces, particularly articles such as this.
It's a similar concept to the 'Topic Sentence' which would be used to sum up the ideas of the following paragraph.
The only reason I could see for actively choosing not to use BLUF - would be to force users to read more of your article for the sake of it, which seems (to me) like a 'cheap' tactic.