AFAIK those commercials are made by the content creators themselves and Nord just gives them a guidelines doc, right?
It's true that VPN doesn't do much tho it definitely used to help with IP-based tracking. Imagine if we all pooled our connections through 1 Lemmy IP then the tracker will be very confused why this one IP is coming to many different sources. It doesn't work as much anymore because now 99% of tracking is done through javascript and it's a long lost battle already.