Nobodies been able to prove they backdoored it or that they have node majority. The assumption/trust we all have to make is that the government wants to hide themselves as much as we do (protecting American intelligence was it’s stated purpose).

i2p has some issues, and isn’t really meant for accessing clearnet sites, so if you discount Tor you’re just accepting that it’s impossible to hide who you are. If you do it over the clearnet your DNS provider will know you asked for Hexbear, and your ISP will know that you accessed the Hexbear IP (and DNS/ISP’s collab w/ the government all the time). And if you’re under the assumption that Tor is a honeypot, it’s not much of a stretch at all to believe VPN servers are compromised (after all, most VPN providers don’t open source their code, unlike Tor).