An always connected VPN to where exactly?

I struggle to find any "VPN Services" I trust not to sell every scrap of data they can harvest, let alone to actually secure their systems. They become relatively high value targets to anyone looking to collect data.

A VPN to your home only punts the issue to your ISP (see my other post on this topic for issues with that).

Connections across the internet desperately need to be secured end-to-end, whether they're coming from your home, cafe, or pub, and they need to be secured yesterday.

Yes, if by "connected to a VPN" you mean two things:

1. You are connected to a trusted network via a VPN protocol. A trusted network might be your home network, a network you operate at a data center, or a network you operate at a cloud provider such as AWS or Azure.

2. You are not using split-tunneling, which is surprisingly common with some VPN clients. Split-tunneling will only send traffic destined for the remote network's address space to the VPN endpoint, sending all other traffic to the local network's gateway (in this case, the rogue router). You will want to disable split-tunneling in order to send all traffic to the VPN endpoint.

It has become popular to refer to connecting to a third-party proxy service that uses VPN protocols as "connecting to a VPN," but if you do that, you are putting your trust in a third-party vendor of proxy services. IMO it's superior to just operate your own private network using a more trustworthy data center or cloud provider.

This is my method of mitigating these attacks. However, more and more websites and services are blocking VPN providers and it’s becoming increasingly problematic to use a well-known commercial VPN for all day, regular use.

Doesn't VPN make things WORSE for you ? When you start using it you create a single log of all your internet activity that is outside of your control. What if your VPN provider gets hacked (and they make much more valuable target for hacking than any single internet user)? Or if it's run by hackers in the first place? :)

If you trust the VPN provider and the website you are visiting (with HTTPS), yes.

It depends on what the other end of the VPN is connected to.