It should be a standard practice to have a unique email and password for every service you use out there, plus the usual like 2FA. I have been doing this for years and never had any issue, but also you can tell if the service got compromised even if they never announced it. For example, I have an account on a service called Shakepay, and recently I have been getting a lot of phishing attempts on that specific unique email that's never been used anywhere else. I can tell for certain that their email database got leaked/they sold it.
A lot of email services that provide the aliasing feature have seamless integration with password managers, so when you sign up you generate a unique email and password on the fly, and it get saved in the manager.
isn’t this easy for a potential attacker to mitigate, i.e. dropping from the address everything after the plus? it’s a known trick for gmail so i would not be surprised if an attacker knew how to get to the “real” address by cleaning it up.
Yes, even some attackers I noticed they excluded all custom domains from their dumps to avoid alerting individuals before they sell it. It’s why it’s better to have a fully unique email, preferably masked one (not custom domains) as some email services provider do, so you get the isolation feature but also blending in without going noticed by attackers.