Wouldn't your traffic then be compromised at the VPN level, opening you to snooping from your provider? Or do I not understand something about how TOR encrypts its requests?
It's very hard and you spend most nights worrying the police will kick your door in. Not too worthwhile.
Those who are serious should learn from the Whonix wiki. It's hard to find a more stellar source of unbiased and comprehensive information. They have pros and cons of both VPN to Tor and Tor to VPN, but that's like 2% of the overall concerns you have to worry about.
I'm posing the question, as I don't see an answer in the article. Nobody gets better at opsec if flawed methodologies aren't picked apart in detail. I'm surprised I was downvoted, but I don't comment here frequently and maybe didn't pose the question in enough detail. This is usually how I was accessing Tor based on the assumption that most of the exit nodes are compromised.
The only reason I ever left Qubes was because Xen still has not implemented a workaround for GPU passthrough with consumer NVIDIA cards like KVM does. I need this for gaming. I now run a KVM system with separate VMs for each domain similarly to Qubes, but the moment GPU passthrough functionality is addressed by Xen I'm moving back.
The KVM experience is quite subpar, for example it is lacking a secure copy-paste between domains and forces me to type out my passwords from my password manager VM when I need them.