Both of you make valid points. The trouble is that the Internet is getting more complicated and also getting more exploited by corporations, e.g. with the recent addition of the A.I. hype. And all kind of people think that they know the answer but later it turns out that they were wrong (Take for example all the Apple fans years ago thinking that Apple + privacy was a really good way of life). The other trouble is that maybe only a few VPN providers are really trustworthy. And then your browser fingerprint can be unique if you add too many extensions or fiddle with certain settings, which means you are track-able and user profiles can be created. And so on and so forth.

It makes sense to think about what you want to protect and avoid. Here some generic suggestion :

• Get yourself a pi-hole at home for your devices to connect to.
• Limit the amount of Java-Script in your web browsers. Lots of websites will do fine.
• Limit the amount of phone apps usage (like you wrote)
• Use Tor browser (slow) or Mullvad VPN in some cases you want to hide your IP address
• Be weary about default settings of Firefox, take a look at LibreWolf
• Use different browsers for different tasks