I would rather put my trust in a good VPN provider than the big CAs. And HTTPS only and DoH is not going to protect you from fingerprinting using your IP address.
That depends on your threat model. It's a useful strategy to hide your traffic from your local network admin (e.g. at the workplace) and your ISP, but it's a bad strategy for hiding your identity from the sites you're visiting.
Depends on your threat model - mine is to make it as annoying and difficult for data sellers and advertisers to profile me as possible so in that scenario a reputable VPN service makes perfect sense.
There's no such thing as total privacy and each service/software is simply a piece of the puzzle. If my government really wanted my data I'm sure they could find a way but making it as difficult as possible for techno-fascists is fine by me.
What does VPN hide that HTTPS can’t hide for media server?
HTTPS Doesn't hide where the traffic is going, so your ISP will track you going to piracy sites. It also doesn't protect you against identification when torrenting.
VPN into your home lab isn't about privacy, it's more about reducing your exposed services to the public internet.
If you have only the ports needed to VPN back into your network, then the rest is hidden behind your router. You only need to fully secure one thing, instead of having to ensure that everything is 100% patched.
It's not the only thing you should be doing, but it does help reduce the probability of a breach.
As some have stated depends on treat model. I personally use Mullvad for both pirating and accesing restricted sites in my country and evading shity laws. 5€ 5 devices with no bottleneck it's pretty good. Sometime I use tor when I try to reach a site that the WiFi provider has blocked
If you are really concerned, buy VPC from large cloud provider, install HTTPS server proxy, configure your web browser to use it. 512MB RAM server will be sufficient as long as it is given enough CPU. Free google instance is suffering from low CPU, not memory.
This way your link between you and internet provider is obscured. Your IP will be shared with others by cloud provider, so you get some obfuscation on that end.
If you use your own certificate authority, then you will get 100% man in the middle protection for link between internet provider and your home. If you use let’s encrypt, then we don’t know that status.
Advantage of this model is speed.
Your browser is still finger-printable, as always.
Securing DNS is its own topic.
You shifted your identity to cloud provider, so it is never 100% safe.
Forget about we keep no logs VPN statements. Judge order and you are logged by VPN provider and don’t know it. So what are you paying for? Slow speed and obfuscation of IP?
This all kind of depends on your threat model... a VPN hides traffic from your ISP, and puts your traffic in with a lot of other traffic, but domestic IPs generally rotate fairly frequently, so only your ISP really knows when that happens, but they also probably sell that data because we live in an over-financialized, under-regulated hellscape, but your VPN also exists in that hellscape, and knows who you are just as much unless you buy Mulvad with perfectly laundered monero and is as likely to be selling that data if not more so than your ISP. There's a reason why people use tor...
I use a VPN but you might look into portmaster and their spn. Its a little slow but even using portmaster without the spn you can filter your traffic and simply deny most apps access to the internet