You're right, but most universities also have a SSO-based proxy to let you do this, or alternatively have integration with an access federation. That means you

You're right, but most universities also have a SSO-based proxy to let you do this, or alternatively have integration with an access federation. That means you have to do an SSO (or have a browser session already authenticated through SSO), but you should still have access to journals and resources without using the VPN. With Covid, I believe any that didn't do this have implemented it, so they weren't overloading their VPN routers with traffic. I've seen a few trying to remind people how to use resources via SSO and access federation, rather than VPN, just to reduce that load.