It's all just an effort to control the 90%.

> Folks would just host their own vpns various places and this would be pointless

In the real world, very few people have that capability.

Detection can be based on the IPs themselves, no packet tricks required. Plenty of services can do that: https://focsec.com/

Now of course, if your VPN is a home-lab style VPN where you are connecting to a little wireguard box sitting in your own home, that is a totally different story.

You can do for free with tailscale exit nodes. Just have a friend in a different location host for you or buy some compute space somewhere