I’ve always used them as a bookmark, specially now they have lists.
There are projects with tens of thousands of stars but with commits from 2-3 years ago, with only dependabot commits, or with 0 issues but every last closed one is from stalebot because the owner doesn’t care to maintain the repo.
Stars are not a way to know if a repo is good.
Just for privacy reasons?
I can decouple the traffic fingerprinting of some sites, like amazon, youtube, reddit, etc.
And because I have a squid proxy router through the vpn set up via a couple of docker containers, I have a firefox container to always send the traffic over the proxy which allows me to easily search for stuff outside and inside the vpn.
Aside from that I also use the proxy to send requests in scripts over the vpn so my real IP doesn’t get rate limited.
And what VPNs are actually for: looking for geo-blocked content.