> Networks like these make it easy for attackers to get a copy of your network data, and if you send something unencrypted, the results can be quite harmful.
The web should be ideally end-to-end encrypted with HTTPS. But in case this assumption breaks down, VPN gives an additional headroom for security. Not much (as explained in the article, and thus should not be advertised so), but still useful.
The internet is so much bigger than just websites. HTTPS is great but VPNs provide encryption at a much lower level, where it should be. Even when using https you are exposing a lot of unencrypted data because https is an application layer encryption. It's not enough.
> Networks like these make it easy for attackers to get a copy of your network data, and if you send something unencrypted, the results can be quite harmful.
The web should be ideally end-to-end encrypted with HTTPS. But in case this assumption breaks down, VPN gives an additional headroom for security. Not much (as explained in the article, and thus should not be advertised so), but still useful.