Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anyone actually pretending it’s different? Most people I talk to buy VPN services to avoid legal threats from pirated movies or to avoid traffic surveillance from their local ISP / workplace / institution. I’ve never heard someone describe it like a hard-to-denonymize tor node or anything.
Lots of services are advertised that way. It's probably half the ads I encounter on YouTube.
Hmm, I block all ads at the network level so maybe I’m just out of the loop on this topic.