Why do you have the belief that the government in the country that the VPN provider is operating is not logging everything that goes into or out of the provider (with or without the provider's knowledge)?
It seems pretty plain to me; Mullvad's website even has the relevant section on Swedish legislation that requires it for national defense.
I just don't see how trust in a provider has any bearing whatsoever on the privacy of the connection they provide; they can't do anything whatsoever to stop (or even detect) governments from logging all of the data that comes into or out of their networks.
Using a VPN is only one piece of maintaining privacy online. It doesn't eliminate the need for end-to-end encryption when dealing with material you wouldn't want third parties to have access to.
If you're using end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter that your traffic is being monitored (I mean, that's an oversimplification, as the presence of large amounts of encrypted traffic is notable in itself, but that's outside the scope of this comment).
A VPN is useful in settings where you're dealing with a malicious ISP (for instance, ones that hijack unencrypted HTTP sessions to inject their own HTML) or any untrustworthy third party network. Do I trust my VPN provider more than my ISP? Yes. Do I trust my VPN provider unconditionally? No. That's what end-to-end encryption is for.
It seems pretty plain to me; Mullvad's website even has the relevant section on Swedish legislation that requires it for national defense.
I just don't see how trust in a provider has any bearing whatsoever on the privacy of the connection they provide; they can't do anything whatsoever to stop (or even detect) governments from logging all of the data that comes into or out of their networks.