If the friends in the group chat don't hit you up individually to let you know about those things, then why would you want to spend time with them in the first place?
6v6 -> 5v5 made the gameplay MUCH better. The new heroes weren't disappointing at all, the game seemed like it was going in a good direction. I disagree on your last two points, and the first one is not relevant to what I said, as that was a major improvement to Overwatch. Too many barriers and abilities on the field in 6v6, and the switch to 5v5 immediately made the game more rewarding and fun.
This is another great resource, although keep in mind some of the rankings are somewhat flawed, as Tom Spark uses a data-driven approach to ranking. For instance, ExpressVPN is ranked above Mullvad largely because it performs a lot better and is much more polished, but I would always recommend Mullvad over Express.
However, in terms of finding out how VPN's compare in functionality and performance, there is no better resource.
Because I never got very good speeds from Proton VPN, and the feature parity has never been very consistent especially because I use Linux. I get much better speeds from Torguard and they allow port forwarding, and have an overall much more feature rich Linux client. I still subscribe to and recommend Proton, I just don't use their VPN or password manager.
If the friends in the group chat don't hit you up individually to let you know about those things, then why would you want to spend time with them in the first place?