This article has a lot of hyperbole which makes me question it as a whole. VPNs are great for harvesting metadata and doing analytics, but realistically most people use encrypted email and messaging these days, so very little of that would be harvested.

Edit: also pretty sure there aren’t 40 million Americans using a Chinese VPN.

An often repeated joke is that the Chinese only spy on us, to subvert Western democratic governments they dont actually care what we're doing: the US government spies on us for far more mundane reasons like propping up intellectual property laws, and to make sure we only do what the DC lobbyists want.