Re: Bad timing, sigh
VPN protocols are not designed to anonymize traffic, never have been. They are designed to prevent snooping on traffic between the VPN endpoints through use of encryption. The early use cases for VPN was to allow extending a private network from one location to another over a public network.
Later, VPN came closer to the user in remote client uses for enterprise employees traveling or working from home to provide a means of connecting enterprise client laptops and desktops to the enterprise network over public networks such as airport wifi, hotel networks, customer/partner networks, or newly emerging home broadband.
In neither of those types of use did the VPN gateway exist outside of the private enterprise/company network. Traffic anonymization was not a consideration, in fact a detriment to the organization.
Consumer oriented VPN placed VPN hosts in the public networks much like public proxy hosts did earlier. They took on the ability of traffic anonymization which public proxies provided with the added benefit of an encrypted connection from the client to the host. From the VPN host to the end destination encryption was dependent on the destination (i.e HTTPS vs. HTTP).
Since the underlying VPN protocols were not designed for anonymization, it should not be attributed to VPN. It can be attributed to public proxies. Consumer VPN should be considered client side encrypted public proxies. Anonymization is no better than a public proxy. We now have the oxymoronic virtual private network (VPN) connection to a public proxy. Such anonymization can be defeated with varying degrees of success depending on the proxy implementation at both the host and client ends. More de-anonymization success occurs at the client end due to lack of skilled system administration managing the majority of consumer client machines.
I utilize a VPS where I have installed Wireguard as a VPN host. I have both a IPV4 and IPV6 dedicated addresses at no additional cost, about the same cost as Mozilla's offering. I would go IPV6 only but things broke when I tried it. I'll need more time to troubleshoot.
Even this setup can "leak" identifying information from the client. The biggest issue is name resolution. Client software has trended towards performing it's own network level services rather than allowing the system to do it. I have had to take extra measures to ensure all client software traffic is directed to the VPN interface.
I had used a consumer VPN service before. I am finding that in the name of security, sites are blocking visitors coming from public proxy and VPN services and in lesser numbers, public cloud by their IP addresses. I have considered filing complaints with regulatory agencies from the basis that these sites are forcing visitors to abandon a security measure protecting the very information the site is supposed to be protecting.