I don't believe it is possible to convince me that VPN's as sold and marketed are anything but a massive scam. Yes, that includes the company that you say is honest.
Perhaps you mean that they are bad value(ripoff vs scam)? Then sure, probably they are. But you're basically paying to not get flagged by cloudfare. Back in the day, you bought a cheap server from OVH or some other lowcost provider, stuck openvpn on it (nowdays wireguard) and you were golden. But now that Cloudfare middle-mans half the internet, it doesn't really work anymore.
You pay the VPN providers for "clean"(ish) IPs so you don't get stuck behind Cloudfare captcha-loops.