From what I saw in gaming circles, VPNs are used to minimize the path between the gamer and an out of region server. Eg, in Quake, the current e-sports tournam

From what I saw in gaming circles, VPNs are used to minimize the path between the gamer and an out of region server. Eg, in Quake, the current e-sports tournament is being played "cross-region", people in US and EU and Oceania compete against each other. Using a VPN can shave some milliseconds off the "ping time" to the servers they're playing on (I think the rule is to use consecutively one server in each player's region). So if the demographic of the youtubers that you mentioned is gamers, then maybe VPNs have their place, not for opsec, but for plain faster internet to remote servers.