Comment by lxgr

Yes, "work" VPNs, site-to-site and many other topologies don't change the default route, but "privacy" VPNs like Mullvad usually do – there is no group of hosts to route traffic for other than simply "the entire internet".

That said, I'm aware of at least one that tries to support an "exempt/excluded hosts" feature, but it does this via some hack using its local DNS resolver and modifying the routing table on the fly, which does not work reliably.