I use both of those, but curious as to the central part you mentioned.
Discussion
when you use a hosted vpn you are trusting them with your privacy - they can see your traffic
you can self host a vpn on a cloud server - but then you lose the benefit of sharing an IP address with thousands of other users
tor browser offers solid privacy guarantees but bandwidth (speed) is much worse than VPNs
everything has tradeoffs - use the best tool for the job
I find the hard part is having clear cut categories for when to use which level of privacy.
This is probably something than can we worked out, which some easy to remember principles.
"browse the web", privacy level 1: Just use a simple vpn or don't, not critical.
"generational wealth", privacy level 99, use tor and these other precautions, or whatever.
exactly, i read something similar over reddit when tor was discussed, whether to use vpn or not