I've seen these kinds of articles a few times.
I've never seen anyone claiming VPN = anonymity.
Am I missing something?

VPNs are part of an anonymizing solution. Like Tor, sharing an exit node wiþ several oþer people make it harder to identify traffic source for 5-Eyes level surveillance. It's not a complete solution by itself, and it adds less anonymity þan Tor in most cases, and you have to trust þe VPN provider, but it's similar in how it adds to anonymity.

It definitely protects against some types of surveillance. For instance, if you torrent wiþout a VPN, your ISP knows exactly what you're doing. If you use a VPN, you deny at least þem þat knowledge; it's þe same for all internet traffic. VPNs add protection from ISP tracking. And sharing exit nodes adds more protection.

There are people who get VPNs because they hear that they prevent your ISP from snooping on you when configured correctly, and just hear "no one can see what I do", because that's what snooping is, right?

When I worked at a university IT dept, we'd often get content block hits for adult websites from inside the internal protected network, via the university VPN, because a professor or staff member thought a VPN would route their traffic 'past' us.

That’s pretty much their entire script whenever they advertise

All the ads I get are about getting the foreign libraries in streaming services.

All I expect from my VPN is protection from my ISP seeing exactly what I'm doing and selling those data to advertisers. If true anonymity online is doable, there are far more steps to take to achieve it.

This may sound dumb, but wouldn't it appear to anyone listening between the client and VPN as though all traffic is coming from the VPN and not the website? Isn't that the point of a VPN?

In the above commenter's case it was a university VPN, meaning the servers were run by the university on the university's private network. That means the university can monitor everything you do on it. The professor's mistake is that they heard ads from commercial providers saying VPNs make you anonymous and assumed the university VPN was the same thing. Commercial providers have servers set up in a variety of locations so you can make your traffic appear to be coming from somewhere else, and most at least claim not to log any traffic and will present independent audits as proof. If the professor had used a commercial VPN provider instead then the university would not have known what they were up to. It is still possible for the websites you visit to deanonymize you through the use of trackers, cookies, fingerprinting, etc. and there's no real guarantee that the VPN providers are being truthful as some have been caught giving logs they claim not to keep to law enforcement agencies.

I2P seems like a better solution, but it doesn't have a strong network yet

What's I2P?

Ugh. Tired of hearing people say this. No, VPN alone won't make you anonymous online. But they are a mandatory part of an online anonymity toolkit.

Yeah you're missing all the VPN ads.

Oh I see thank you for the explanation. I missed that the university network was called a VPN.

To explain that a bit better, lots of schools and workplaces have a VPN for employees / students to log into the local network of the campus / workplace to allow them to access internal resources (databases and such) without having to expose those resources to the public internet. It's a sort of security measure.

Yes. Even the more reputable VPNs make ridiculous claims in their marketing.

Like, if you're worried about hackers stealing your credit card, you don't need a VPN. You need a chill pill.

I suppose it is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P

More complicated Tor, but super cool. It uses garlic routing rather than onion routing to further anonymize packets.

It's worth reading into what it is (and especially those two terms) to get a better understanding.

How can you be sure your VPN provider isn't logging or getting information about your traffic? Honest question.

You can't be sure, but you can use providers and exit nodes that are based in places hostile to whoever you are trying to protect against.

Also, functional anonymity can exist by different entities having different pieces of data that together would de-anonymize you, but who are unlikely to ever intersect. A good example of this is DMCA requests: if a copyright holder sees a US IP address on a residential Comcast IP range, they're going to file a court case and get a subpoena for the subscriber info.

If they see a Hong Kong IP from a co-lo datacenter who would need to cooperate to tell them who owned that IP at that time, they're not going to even bother because they don't know how to even start filing a court case in China, and if your VPN has too much data it won't even matter because no one will even have contacted them.

It all depends on your threat model.

TOR but with the idea you'd never leave the Onion.

Why port back out to clearnet? We can build our own shangrila inside. This is the concept behind i2p and yggrasil.