> The inescapable fact about Tor is that its traffic patterns make you stand out prominently.

I'm curious as to how it stands out. I can imagine a few things, like an ISP seeing traffic to known TOR intermediary nodes, or maybe analyzing packets to look for some sort of handshake?

> Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look.

Sort of. But what would looking do? What does looking mean? The traffic is encrypted, they can look all they like. In the US they'll need more than "they connected to TOR" to get a warrant to search your device.