>Why not? Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy. The VPN provider can see all your traffic, and do with it what they want - including logging.

Most people use VPNs because they are a glorified proxy.

>Doesn't matter. You're still connecting to their service from your own IP, and they can log that.

This is true, although it can be possible to connect to the VPN from Tor (when using OpenVPN or WireGuard-over-TCP). Obviously, all traffic could be associated with your account so don't use multiple identities if you want reasonable anonymity. And it's slow, so it's usually not worth it.

>VPNs don't provide privacy, with a few exceptions (detailed below). They are just a proxy. If somebody wants to tap your connection, they can still do so - they just have to do so at a different point (ie. when your traffic leaves the VPN server).

Your ISP cannot. Some (many?) countries like Australia have data retention laws. A VPN will hide your traffic from your ISP (although probably not a large sufficiently motivated adversary like a government out to get you), which can be useful even if your VPN provider can log your traffic.

(there may be some things like traffic analysis where they might be able to guess the type of traffic you're using, though I'm not sure how effective if is or if many ISPs actually attempt this)

>Your IP address is a largely irrelevant metric in modern tracking systems. Marketers have gotten wise to these kind of tactics, and combined with increased adoption of CGNAT and an ever-increasing amount of devices per household, it just isn't a reliable data point anymore.

>Marketers will almost always use some kind of other metric to identify and distinguish you. That can be anything from a useragent to a fingerprinting profile. A VPN cannot prevent this.

This is true, though the impact can be somewhat minimized with Tor Browser with the Tor proxy disabled (or Mullvad Browser), which have decent fingerprinting mitigations.

>In the second case, you'd probably just want a regular proxy specifically for that traffic - sending all of your traffic over a VPN provider (like is the default with almost every VPN client) will still result in the provider being able to snoop on and mess with your traffic.

Do any regular proxy (socks5/http) providers provide the same quality of service as VPN providers? And you can't port forward over a socks5 proxy, which can be useful for torrenting. (if you're downloading popular content you don't need it, but if you're downloading torrents with only a few seeders or maximizing the amount of upload you get on a private tracker, port forwarding can be useful).

Also, if you're on Linux you can use network namespaces to use some applications over VPNs and not others. (remember to refresh private keys and use a different server before using the namespace for a different identity)

>If you absolutely need a VPN, and you understand what its limitations are, purchase a VPS

>A VPN provider specifically seeks out those who are looking for privacy, and who may thus have interesting traffic. Statistically speaking, it is more likely that a VPN provider will be malicious or a honeypot, than that an arbitrary generic VPS provider will be.

VPSes are arguably worse for some use cases as most probably don't handle DMCAs as well as commercial VPNs, you don't have access to a large amount of servers and countries to change your IP address, and you have less people to blend in with. I see your point, though I'm not sure how true that is.