Will otherwise intelligent people want to fight tooth and nail if I mentioned any specific VPN provider being incapable having privacy assurances you can rely on? Of course so lets do it anyway
Protonmail
NordVPN
ExpressVPN
every one
It doesnt matter what you want to believe, the entire concept doesnt do what people think it does.
You would simply have no way of knowing if a VPN suddenly did start keeping logs.
I agree if your threat model requires that nobody eavesdrop/log your traffic, then a commercial VPN service probably isn't the right tool, and you should probably use tor instead. That said, it doesn't mean commercial VPNs are placebo/snakeoil. They still provide:
* anonymity from the websites you visit: your home internet connection's IP typically uniquely identifies you/your household (assuming no CGNAT). Meanwhile, a VPN server might be used by tens of hundreds of people, which greatly increases your anonymity set. It's further improved if you rotate VPN servers, because a VPN service might be used by millions of people.
* extra degree of separation: your ISP knows a lot of info about you (name, address, payment info, maybe even credit score), whereas a VPN service might only know your email and the ip you connect from. If your VPN service decides to go rogue and sell your browsing habits, they'll have a much harder time associating it with your real life identity.
anything that requires a government not knowing is outside of the use case