In terms of just masking your source address from services that you actively chose to connect to, a self-hosted VPN may reduce your traceability for many – goin

In terms of just masking your source address from services that you actively chose to connect to, a self-hosted VPN may reduce your traceability for many – going from potentially many source addresses (your home ISP's range if they use NAT, your mobile provider's range as the almost certainly have you behind CGNAT, and any wireless networks you pass through if you use public networks) to a single fixed address. But for other details, more significant in many use cases, a private VPN wins because you are protecting your activity from being viewed by those potentially untrusted networks. Of course once traffic leaves your VPN it is once again at the mercy of the wider Internet between there and the destination sites & services, so use secure transports like HTTPS where-ever possible even over the VPN. It all depends on what your threat model actually is. In fact the advertised “access different media” use case isn't addressing an active threat at all, it is about gaining access to something rather than protecting you from someone/something.