Everything is a trade-off, at some point you need to trust someone. I've got a box with OVH that I use as a VPN with wireguard. I just assume that OVH aren't logging all my traffic because it would cost them money and cut into their margins.

I would never do anything illegal via that VPN though, since it would be trivial to trace it back to me. I'm sure OVH wouldn't hesitate to hand over my details if the authorities requested them. But as a privacy protection on public wifi, it works well.

When choosing a VPN, you should think about what you're trying to achieve and what you're trying to protect yourself from. Most non-tech people I know that use VPNs, use them to bypass geo-restrictions. For that purpose, these giant commercial ones are probably fine.

I think he meant more control of the traffic by making sure personally it won't log anything. That is high technical skillset out of reach for most users. And if you do even set that up, you will waste a lot of time maintaining. The time lost need to get compensated as he will need to pay bills...and hence he himself quit his day job and become NordVPN. Again, not many users willing to go thru that.