That article is a… bit conflating in terms of privacy and anonymity. The whole idea of a VPN has been discarded by the writer just because there is a paywall around it. People can use it for using SaaS like games, streaming platforms to acquire contextual anonymity and/or security.

A very popular use is for torrenting as well, and some trackers do not like same IP being abused by many people, so IP range blocks also exist. VPNs help bypass those as well.