I'm mostly consume proton via proton-bridge, which is running in a dedicated VM. Then all my IMAP clients connect to that single instance.

Also, for email sending I use smtp2go free tier - primarily because I use random emails on my own domains to see who's leaking, and I don't want to set them up separately proton-side.

In that setup, proton itself is kinda unnecessary - I keep that path mostly as an insurance, just in case of acatastrophic homelab failure.