I forgot, to be honest, that I had two other Gmail logins running on my headless tower at the other end of the room, so requests were coming from my country and from the US simultaneously.

Since I wasn't trying to evade geoblocking, I now use a VPN that's set to my own city AND I shut down the applications on the headless machine. But that still leaves my phone sucking in mails on a non-VPN connection, and that's not so easy to fix, because I'm damned if I'll switch it off every time I need a VPN, or trouble myself to use a VPN on that too.

So, yeah, in general I'm worried too. Personally I think we'll look back on VPN use in five years the way that early 20thC cocaine addicts fondly remember when you could just buy the stuff over the counter without a scrip in pharmacies. Sorry to see China setting the pace on this one.