Could you really not have thought about this a bit harder? I do think that anyone here should generally just get a cheap tier VPS (or use their own existing VPS

Could you really not have thought about this a bit harder? I do think that anyone here should generally just get a cheap tier VPS (or use their own existing VPS or colo or whatever depending) and run a VPN for themselves via algo or similar vs a public commercial VPN service offering, but the point of doing so isn't that complicated. Individual->Internet mediating VPNs are about shifting your effective general WAN traffic entry point from the Internet edge (the local ISP, which for many of us amounts to a single monopoly provider or a public WAN point which is also not at all trustworthy) towards the Internet core backbone, where there is extremely robust competition and in turn customer responsiveness. It's an economic hack. There are many ways my ISP might be tempted to not work on my behalf, be it active (monitoring traffic for their own advertising benefits) or merely through laziness (not putting up any resistance against even warrantless mass surveillance requests), because I have nowhere else to go and they know it. Whereas OVH/DigitalOcean/Linode/Scaleway/Amazon/Google/whomever all have much stronger incentives to put their customers first and foremost. In terms of business model (due to how utterly trivially I could rip down a VPS and set of containers/services at any one of them and set up something identical at any other at any time) they're much more closely aligned with customer interests. It has nothing to do with any illegal behavior per se (at least in the USA, in many countries "illegal behavior" may encompass things we consider basic rights), it has to do with economic alignment and additional privacy/security at a cheap price.