I was checking a friend network over Tor and I was curious about the country that would show in his logs so I checked where my exit node was from… It got me thinking, it’s well known most exit nodes are in the hands of governments, so people deep in OpSec using Tor network, do they check if the exit node they are using is not in a 14 Eyes country (or other places depending on their threat model)? And if this is a practice, do you believe countries controlling exit nodes for intel and surveillance might actually be connecting their nodes to servers in other unsuspecting countries, VPN-like, just to not reveal that node is actually feeding data to their country?

People who are seriously invested in IPsec absolutely do control their nodes. There’s a few settings in the Tor conf that allow you to exclude countries out of exit (and entry) nodes.