I don’t use VPNs anymore. They feel pointless now since almost every website has antibot systems, and VPN IP ranges are much easier to flag than residential proxies.
I use a VPN because I still seed 10s of thousands of torrents and have a static IP address. I don't want the swarm to see that. Most of them are from private sites I trust, but some from private sites that have a huge membership I'm not sure about. I have a lot of movies and music that isn't available anywhere else and archiving that is important to me. Kept my music collection from what.cd and a lot of that you can't even buy on discogs.
It's not great as a Mullvad user: YouTube constantly complains and also shadowbans some of my livestreaming functionality, and my X account has now been flagged as a bot, which requires me to download the app and verify myself in ways that they won't explain. And X is practically useless without a user, much like Instagram. TikTok also shadowbans you with reduced functionality.
Twitch and Discord meanwhile feel remarkably unaffected compared to their counterparts.
VPNs in the aftermath of FireSheep[1] before we got proper HTTPS, but it's not likely to be the ban or censorship circumvention tool we think they are.