I'm quite disenchanted here. So this means that it is practically impossible to avoid IP fingerprints in any way ? Even with Tor, VMs, etc ? You'll always be at the mercy of whoever runs the show unless you own the physical servers
Tor does defeat this though. Rather than seeing the true destination of your traffic they see that of a Tor exit node.
Seeing a packet heading to a tor exit node and then a similarly sized packet heading onwards a fraction of a millisecond later is a pretty surefire way to spy on individual tor users.
If 1, 2, or possibly all 3 nodes are run by a malicious actor, deanonymization becomes easier. At one point 10% of nodes were run by a single malicious actor: https://therecord.media/a-mysterious-threat-actor-is-running...
IIRC There is an alternate method of connecting to an endpoint which uses a 3rd node as a rendezvous point which is meant to be better, but I forget the name of the process...