some of those Free VPN add-ons will high jack you and cause real problems ,Browsec VPN will eat you alive it’s always on even if you try to turn it off and everything you do goes through them
I use no VPN. I just watch the traffic through the firewall (both ways). I have a homebrew dynamic firewall and a few honeypots, so get a real good view of intrusion attempts. Have had up to 7000 ipv4/24 ranges blocked at a time for ssh and smtp intrusion attempts, mostly ssh (and that is on a non-standard but not uncommon port).
At any rate, one of these days I’m sure I’ll update the GUI browser to something current. Often, whatever it is that puts me off is cured over time. I’m guessing some sort of bloat put me off this upgrade, like mandatory use of pulseaudio.