Cisco used to not be that selective.
They used to give out free Meraki APs to everyone just for attending their webinars.
The catch with those devices was licensing. You’ve got some limited-time free license, and then you either paid or kept a paperweight.
At least officially. Some of them were later supported by OpenWRT, but newer ones are more locked down.
Not Mullvad’s fault, they’re just on some of the used blocklists. Not really much you can do about it besides finding a not yet blocked servers.