If you’re willing to pay though, why not just spin up a VPS somewhere and run Tailscale on it?

It is some effort to set up, and VPS seems generally more expensive than a commercial VPN which has more nodes and other extra things. You're moving your location which is cool, but multiple people use VPN nodes which serves as a mask because you can't differentiate what traffic belongs to which user; You're also still trusting whoever you rent your VPS from that they haven't set up some sort of monitoring on a higher level before tailscale running on the machine can encrypt traffic.