[01nate]

I don't necessarily disagree that there's a lot of people being sold a VPN that probably don't need it, but VPNs still can be a legitimate tool. Even outside of the "well known" VPN uses like piracy, privacy (in a 'I trust it more then my ISP' fashion), and getting around geo-fences there's still uses for them. A couple of quick examples:

Getting around blocks or monitoring on networks like work WiFi. No need to tell my work I'm on Indeed, and for a little while they seemed to block my email provider (Proton) and reading my email is handy to be able to do.

For use as a network tool. For example, I was recently helping my brother set up a website, and with port forwarding he was able to really easily VNC into my VM I was working on it with.

VPNs can also be handy for the 'slightly suspicious stuff' that's not illegal. You know, things like an internet search about something you saw on TV or were just curious about that's not illegal to research, but you're worried it could be a suspicious search. Or maybe I want to use wget to grab an offline archive of a website, but don't want to raise alarms and get my IP banned.