Comment by bananapub

what does "VPN use seems to have exploded in recent years" mean? I mean, what have you observed? "VPN" means lots of different things.

VPN to company is much more popular with businesses because of WFH and Covid.

consumer VPNs to random providers that advertise on podcasts are way up because of different countries having different video streaming service catalogs and because in the US consumer ISPs are increasingly privacy- and reliability-hostile. there's also a big marketing buzz because scaring people over these things was good for signups, so consumer VPN providers chose to advertise a lot.

Tailscale on the other hand is a way to re-create an actually flatly routable Internet, for myself, but with 2023 security levels.