Longtime Mullvad user, always been happy. But when Mullvad was still a small service it was unusual to have any problems when browsing the web with their IPs.
Recently, many services can detect you're on a VPN when using Mullvad and block or ban you, which means they've become successful enough that there are countrer-VPN databases including all of their IPs.
Pretty sure fextra just rips all their content from other wikis anyway, at least this was definitely my experience in the past. Just try scrolling past the first link in your search engine.
There's a browser extension that suggests (and optionally redirects to) better wikis when your search results include a Fandom/Fextralife link. I think it's called Indie Wiki Buddy.
I can't speak to the ripping of content, but you have to scroll pretty far depending on the subject to get a better result.
Searching "Soul of Cinder" on Google is all Fextralife, fandom, YouTube, reddit, ign/Gamespot/etc. Wikidot doesn't show up until halfway down the first page and it doesn't show up at all on duckduckgo.
The answer is probably to add specific sites names to my searches but I'm lazy
I feel like I have it easy as a WoW player — we’ve got wowhead, which is partially datamining and partially crowdsourced (and has its own newsgathering staff) and it’s always been very helpful when trying to figure something out that isn’t self-evident (quests with erroneous instructions that weren’t corrected during beta testing, stuff like that).
I've just come to accept that constant captchas are a fact of life for browsing on a VPN. Cost of doing business. Worth it for the privacy though imo (VPNs in general, I haven't used Mullvad).
Some are definitely better than others. I've used new VPN services that get you through every checkpoint just like a home IP address. And some that, as you mention, throw up every captcha known to man.