I also had that problem, but didn’t think much of it since I don’t really turn off my VPN often. It only really affected me when either my first issue occurred or ProtonVPN crashed for whatever reason. So far, running ProtonVPN through OpenVPN had solved this issue for me.
I kinda wanna try Gentoo just for the experience, but as someone who already uses Arch, I’m worried it will take up more of my time than my current setup already does.