Confused about taking up a MSc+PhD in my home country vs doing the same in a different country

Warning:Long post

I'll be graduating out of my engineering degree in a year and I decided not to head into the corporate and choose research as my career path but there's a lot of dilemma surrounding my decision whether to study back at home (India) or look into doing a MSc + PhD.

I finalised my decision to stick to research after months of trying research jobs and fiddling around with some attempts to write some conference papers.

The Problem at Home

We have an exam here called GATE which usually requires you to sacrifice all of your free time, personal life to get into a masters program, which I find it to be brutal. I already tried prepping for this test and gave up due to a bad burnout because it was also hindering my personal life and growth. If all goes well, I'd have enough marks to get into a barely useful masters degree.

I find this route to be brutal because the quality of research isn't that great here because no matter how hard I try I can only get into mid tier masters universities (It has nothing to do with any kind of skill or intelligence btw, the test is just brutal).

When I burnt out badly, I found out that I could invest the same time into undergraduate research and prep myself for a MSc+PhD in another country. One of my greatest strengths is networking, I'm very good at it. Profs at my current uni are more than willing to help me with research.

Studying in a Foreign Country

One major problem is the cost of education. While my family can afford the expenditures in an EU country, they're telling me to consider studying back at home as its relatively cheap. They don't know a bit about academia or STEM in general. Any conversation that I try to have with them usually comes back to them wanting me to earn a lot of money while working in corporate despite me telling them several times that I don't want to.

They're right about the "cheap" part. It's not that expensive to study at the mid tier unis that I get here but the problem is the masters or PhDs you get here usually aren't that valuable within the country either.

A Middle Ground

One middle ground that I could think of is; studying my masters here but doing my PhD in another country but this also has a problem -- I can't get the right networking opportunities. As of now I volunteer for a major Open Source project and we often have meetings in Europe where we network with each other.

I also struggle to find any institute in India that actually focuses on the Hardware side of computers, a field that I'm interested in taking up for my research career.

What after PhD?

Honestly, I haven't thought that far yet. I believe that's too far away in the future but I wouldn't mind returning back to home if I feel like it.

I personally think I'd have a great future if I make the move to study somewhere else but the path is incredibly uncertain with all of the crap in the economy. That way, I could take up academia in a foreign country or return back home and take up professorship.

This post was more of a rubber ducking post to tell things to myself to get a solution out of myself but if anybody made it this far, I'd appreciate to know what you think about what I'm thinking.