It doesn't matter what
I should do, it matters what a random firefox user who finds themselves in a coffee shop is doing.
Some of the public transit I've been on disagrees strongly with VPNs because they do heavy traffic shaping and VPNs fall into the "make this really slow" category. Reasonably so.
I also disagree with this advice. For myself and the vast majority of people $5/month is not worth it for the negligible difference in security and privacy over https, and DNS over https. This becomes even more true with encrypted SNI.
In fact, a VPN is largely worse privacy wise because "random coffee shop internet with random MAC address" is pretty anonymous unless you sign into anything over http.
