The way I understand it is that if you don’t trust your ISP then a VPN is a suitable choice, if you don’t trust your government then much more serious technological measures are required and even then it’s fairly unlikely you’re winning against a state organisation that’s decided it specifically doesn’t like you.
I don’t trust either my government or my phone company to be honest, but I’m not doing anything that would offend my government so I’m not enormously worried about them while my ISP and phone company have a strong incentive to abuse my privacy and monetise my traffic further. Even if they didn’t, VPNs offer protection when using public WiFi which can often be badly set up. Having said that using a free VPN is asking to get mugged off in my opinion, paid VPN providers at least have an incentive not to compromise your privacy as it’d be bad for their business.