It doesn't, it simply protects the transport between the untrusted network location (e.g. coffee shop, airport, or Apartment 23C's unsecured wifi) and your VPN

It doesn't, it simply protects the transport between the untrusted network location (e.g. coffee shop, airport, or Apartment 23C's unsecured wifi) and your VPN endpoint, which presumably has a suitably "safe" transport. Without digging into too much detail, or providing a whack of data because I am not writing long form about this and I spent too much time writing comments on HN this morning :P, but my observation has been that the majority of unsecured apps have service endpoints that are deployed in cloud service provider environments, so if you have a VPN end point that terminates inside the same region, then it is highly unlikely that your traffic will hit the Internet before arriving at it's destination. That said, it's TCP/IP, so all it takes is a routing change and all of those assumptions go out the window... Beyond that, MITM and traffic monitoring is happening all of the time in many network service providers, not all of it's nefarious -- alot of traffic analysis is just sampling to make sure that the network is working well and to understand whats happening. That said, there are many service providers and jurisdictions that opportunistically capture data or modify traffic in flight for purposes other than quality of service (e.g. ISPs injecting advertisements into HTTP traffic, surveillance, etc) Using a VPN in this way doesn't protect you against those kinds of threats - the value in using a VPN here is about preventing local eavesdroppers from monitoring network metadata that can be used to classify your traffic and track you. There are many examples, but one clear one is for marginalized people, such as folks from the LGBT community using specific apps (e.g. gay dating apps such Grindr or Growlr) that could out them to a monitoring service while in a jurisdiction or community hostile to them. Having that traffic tunneled safely to a "known safe" destination, e.g. an AWS or GCP instance in a safer region, would provide a measure of protection. I had a discussion with a colleague about this about a year ago, but I think it would be very awesome to build an open source VPN service that leveraged AWS & GCP VPCs and inter region peering so that it would egress in the same cloud provider regions as destination IP blocks to prevent as much traffic as possible from flowing over the public internet, but I haven't had the time to put into it.