VPN do I need one?

Typically, you shouldn’t need a VPN. A VPN can help you to hide your location or access certain content (like content on a company intranet for your employer). If you’re worried about privacy and you subscribe to iCloud+ you can use Private Relay.

Theres an article about iCloud+’s Private Relay: About iCloud Private Relay - Apple Support

For connecting into the internal network of an affiliated organization, yes.

For testing geographically- and network-distributed websites and related web caching services, sure.

For the first-few-hops VPN apps so heavily hyped, probably not so much. Those badly solve a problem which hasn’t existed for a decade or so, and wrapping a second and usually weaker and partial tunnel around the first tunnel is just adding extra overhead.

Some other discussions:

… https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2021/08/12/how-private-is-my-vpn

… https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgxnwk/you-probably-dont-need-a-vpn

… https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/1f3bc4d889b02b35d8aa

I use one when working from home so my work laptop has a presence on my companys network rather than on my personal network, of cause if I used the vpn on my private computer it too would have a presence on my company network rather than on my personal network which could give issues for it communicate with devices on the personal network