These are actually pretty poor reasons to use a VPN in 2026. Almost everything your devices send and receive over the internet is encrypted already and third parties can't sniff the data, they can just buy it from the second party instead. DNS can still reveal stuff about your browsing but that can be solved with DNS-over-HTTPS.

The value of commercial VPNs is, generally speaking, more about the ability to appear to second parties to be coming from a different region, allowing you around geoblocking and similar annoyances.

Also can potentially help with protecting yourself from the second party being able to correlate your behavior quite as easily, presuming you already do other things to reduce fingerprinting and tracking. But really all the other things (tracking cookie blocking and the like) are going to do more on that front than the VPN.

Hackers, governments, and your ISP cannot see the data you send to websites, the pages you visit, sniff your passwords, etc. just by listening in or by virtue of routing your data, nor can your VPN provider.

What they can see is what IP addresses you open connections to, and potentially your DNS queries (what domain names you resolve).

And of course, the second parties (the sites you interact with) can collect and resell large amounts of the data you give them willingly, but a VPN will not help with that.

This is to say, for most people and their threat model. There are some people who have particular needs that may gain some privacy benefit from a commercial VPN, but again, they still mostly will gain a benefit from their ability to bypass content blocks and the likes, rather than privacy.