vpn gives privacy from your ISP and whoever your ISP reports to, which is often the government. as long as your vpn service is in a jurisdiction that can’t demand your data from them, and your country doesn’t make vpns illegal, it’s pretty effective.

also i think it’s pretty clear to see that your vpn alternative is impossibly complex for the average person, and the ease of use of vpns is what people are paying extra for. perhaps someone should make an open source tool that automatically does all of this with a vpn-like interface, so you can just buy a vps with ssh already setup, give this software the credentials, and use it like a vpn. assuming that vps host gives you all the region options you want and the software is able to change them by itself