Everything you wrote requires ignoring the entire last decade. But fine, for an illustrative example lets use this article as an example. The government asked

Everything you wrote requires ignoring the entire last decade. But fine, for an illustrative example lets use this article as an example. The government asked Google for IP addresses, then the government did an additional thing to determine the phone number was tied to the person they indicted, whether that was due to a Google account or requiring them to go to the cellular provider. Nobody in this thread is arguing about the false positives snatching innocent people, just the VPN part. With a VPN the same government would have gone to Google, then to the VPN company, then to the cellular provider. VPN didn't help the customer, just slowed the government down. You also wouldn't know if passive surveillance was being done on the VPN provider, which has been shown to happen to ISPs before from the Snowden leaks 7 whole years ago, which was about things that were even older. The NSA and FBI used National Security Letters to directly tap the servers indefinitely, and the CIA would just pay companies to directly tap the servers. They can be more easily coervice domestically, but other countries, even countries without automatic cooperation treaties are eager to help US investigators and have. You wouldn't know if Proton/ExpressVPN/Nord you name it were passively sharing data, if they began keeping logs if at one point they say they didn't, if you were the active target, etc.