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.
If people think they do other things, that's not a "scam", that's people being misinformed about what a VPN is and does. That's on them.
'Honest' in what regard? That security and encryption can't be attained to value people's privacy?
Let's not take away from the fact that things like Wikipedia are blocking entire countries (UK) to its services.
When deleting/blocking the forum becomes easier than compliance or risking fines/being punished, they will _delete the forum_