Well said. The modern web is an absolute wreck thanks to out of control bots and the intrusive ways that sites defend against them. It's actually one of the reasons why I don't use a VPN nearly as much as I used to: it just turns the modern web into a nightmare to use. Thankfully, if you're worried about privacy, VPNs are actually less necessary these days. Switching to encrypted DNS with a privacy-respecting resolver (I recommend Quad9) virtually eliminates any actionable data that your ISP can sell. They still see the raw IPs but that sort of data is harder to market to data brokers and it's also less effective because of how so many sites run on massive CDNs, meaning they'd only be seeing your connection to the CDN's nearest datacenters. Granted, that doesn't prevent the CDNs from selling traffic data, and it doesn't prevent individual sites from knowing your IP, so there's still a use case for VPNs but it all depends on threat model. For me, I only really use a VPN for evading geoblocks and for when I visit an unfamiliar site that I don't want having my real IP. Everything else in my threat model is largely covered by using encrypted DNS with Quad9.