VPN companies are more trustworthy than my ISP. Many get third party audits and publish results. And if the VPN company and server are in a privacy friendly country, they are hard to subpoena. Individual privacy being the default is itself valuable.
This is leaving aside numerous other reasons like avoiding censorship or persecution or whatever.
But that said, on this point I do agree with the author: privacy improvements from using a VPN are marginal for the average user due to the now widespread use of HTTPS. Yes, your ISP can see which domains you visit, but that's about it. I'm curious if there have been any successful lawsuits or prosecutions based solely on domain access logs.
Side question: Anyone know of a gateway or self-host service which supports DNS over HTTPS relay?
i.e. it will accept vanilla DNS requests, but if it needs to forward requests, it will only do so to DoH / DoT servers?
The main reason they exist is to do grey market bypass of controls becoming media access. If you trust them to not do some grey/shady exploitation of your metadata, more power to you. Sounds foolish to me.