Both you and these commenters are missing the point. They're not just collecting metadata. We know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA was able to decrypt most

Both you and these commenters are missing the point. They're not just collecting metadata. We know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA was able to decrypt most https traffic as well as most SSH and VPN traffic around 2013. Although protocol security has been beefed up a bit and many bugs have been weeded out since then, it's still naive to assume they've lost this capability.