I didn't find this article very convincing.

1. "You must trust the VPN." This is true, but you must trust something (your cafe, your ISP, your computer). In fact the entire article really hinges on this point -- the VPN provider could, if it were malicious (or compelled to by a government) log every aspect of your traffic, or even insert malware. However, so could your home ISP or your coffee shop.

In particular I found this statement very bizarre: "VPN services require that you trust them, which is a property that anonymity systems do not have." This is true in a vacuum. In the real world, unless you're running your own hardware with software you have written yourself from scratch (on a system which you monitor continuously), you are trusting a huge amount of stuff even with the best anonymity system. The point is knowing what you are trusting, rather than trusting it implicitly.

Essentially the point of the article seems to be to point out that VPN providers may be (there are a lot of hedge words) untrustworthy. The only actual example given of an untrustworthy VPN provider is a free one which re-sold its users' bandwidth (point 8).

Real-world examples are important, because reputation is important -- at some point it is very likely that you will end up trusting someone, even if you are being very careful.

2. "Some VPNs don't permit peer-to-peer sharing and/or log such sharing". You must rely on reputation, which is not a great option. However, no alternatives are presented for someone who wants to torrent copyrighted or illegal works (TOR is heavily FUDded in the article). You certainly wouldn't roll your own VPN for this -- see below.

3. "VPNs don't protect very much against ad tracking". This is true, but I mean VPNs don't make your teeth much whiter either.

4. "A dodgy VPN could log all your data". This is the same as point 1.

5. Preshared keys. OpenVPN with server certificate checking would seem to address this.

6. "Your VPN provider might log your data". This is the same as point 1.

7. "Leakage". It's useful to inform people about this. However, once informed, it is quite simple to use one of many online services to verify that no information is leaked.

8. "Snake oil" and in particular a free VPN which sold its users' bandwidth. Fairly obviously, be aware that if you are using a free product the company will attempt to monetise you in some way.

The suggestion to set up your own VPN seems to be presented as a way to improve privacy. This is very strange particularly since no threat model is presented, and the common one (mass surveillance) gets much worse with a personal VPN.

Firstly, shared hosting providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, OVH and so on are presented. There is no particular reason to suspect that these are more or less trustworthy than any given VPN provider. In particular, shared hosting in the US will certainly be subject to the monitoring whims of the US government.

Secondly, using such a DIY solution will associate all your traffic, and only your traffic, with a single outgoing IP address, easily traceable to you (since you're paying for it). Compare this with any shared-endpoint VPN, where your traffic is combined with that coming from many other users, and the owner of the IP address is a VPN company. In the former situation nobody would even need to inform the hosting company -- they could just monitor its traffic (though as discussed in point 1 they certainly could contact the hosting company if necessary). In the latter situation, the VPN company would need to be involved. At this point a certain amount of process is required. If your threat model is mass surveillance rather than targeted monitoring, then the shared VPN provider certainly seems like an improvement over a roll-your-own solution. "The best place to hide an incriminating letter is in a letter rack!" -- Edgar Allen Poe.

Thirdly, with a DIY solution you are implicitly claiming that you are better at hardening a system and staying on top of security patches than is the VPN provider you were considering going with. This isn't necessarily true.

If you are just concerned about opportunistic data collection from your coffee shop, then a personal VPN would help. But it's quite limited, and significantly simpler solutions like HTTPS Everywhere would get you 90-100% of the way there.

If you are specifically concerned about an entity with the resources of a government monitoring specifically you, none of the options presented will be any use.