headroom

that said, I can't stand having someone stalk and monetize your every move

Well, they can't. I have an anonymus account only for youtube that I access only over the VPN with adblockers.

I don't want to do all that just to watch a few videos a day.

Ye mullvad uses their blocklists but does not provide the features mostly listed in the security tab. I still don't get how dot and doh are relevant with phishing.

Is it necessary, compared to the measures I mentioned above?

That product is trash but how is what you're doing helping with phishing?

The only purpose of vpns is to hide your ip address, which is already dynamic and is shared by many people or access location restricted content.

Don't use a VPN.

If they're going to force me to use Windows or Mac, I'd much rather Windows than Mac. Piece of shit of an "operating system".

Yep. Windows or Mac. Typical corporate IT spyware isn't even available on Linux.