If you trust your home network / ISP / Government more than you trust the Starbucks (or any public) network, you get to at least transfer your risk.

But you also don't get much more than that for using a paid-VPN, you just transfer the risk of being snooped on to their network/ISP as opposed to your own. Same with running a node on AWS/Digital Ocean.

VPNs do not make you anonymous. A shared VPN might give you some plausible deniability but it's hard to trust that your specific traffic isn't being logged.