Just my opinion, I think they are a little late to be starting this movement. From the day they invaded Ukraine the Russian Youtubers were sharing information both inside and outside of Russia about what both Russian and non-Russian media were saying. I follow a few of them. It's mostly young people that use VPN's and get their news online in Russia and that is precisely who fled. Russia have lost over 1 million men that would otherwise be subject to conscription. Most of those Youtubers have also fled the country and continue to use VPN's to share information in and out of Russia as laws were created to crack down on anyone speaking out against the military operations. The article talks about Russia potentially following the firewall strategy of China but I think a bigger concern would be the families of the Youtubers that fled being harassed or worse which is an ongoing problem in China when their citizens that relocate speak ill of the CCP.
Also just recently Russia changed their laws about evading conscription making it a more serious offense and pretty much guaranteeing those men will not return until the Russian government is entirely replaced.
It seems like whenever VPNs are discussed, on HN and elsewhere, a typical refrain is something like "governments can trivially track VPN users, VPNs do nothing". I think I'm probably overstating the claim a little, because I don't remember exactly what it is, and it varies a little from claimant to claimant. But the idea is that you'd have to be naive to think any VPN will protect you from a state actor, because they can either spot you based on when traffic enters and leaves the VPN, or simply because every VPN company provides data to them on request, if not in real time. I can imagine that a determined agency could fairly easily triangulate enough information to identify an individual VPN user's activity, and I can imagine many of them rolling over when threatened. But, this is at least some evidence that VPNs frustrate governments for the very common use case of large numbers of regular people using them to bypass censorship restrictions.
The argument is generally against using a VPN for privacy reasons. VPNs are often marketed as being a tool to "keep your browsing private" but the truth is that almost all of your browsing data is already private thanks to widespread HTTPS. And the information that isn't private (i.e. IP addresses you connect to, connection metadata) still isn't private if you use a VPN. Instead it just changes who can see that data - instead of your local ISP it becomes the VPN operator plus their ISP.
Users in Russia (and China, Iran etc.) are primarily using VPNs as a way to access content that is blocked by their local governments. So in these use cases a VPN actually is quite effective - the local government can no longer see your metadata and restrict your connections.
Basically, a VPN does not make it any harder for someone to steal your password/credit card number, but it is a useful tool to prevent an adversary on your local network from messing with your connections.
VPN's definitely work if you use them correctly. There are plenty that don't give any gov data, especially not in real time. Yes, the capability is there if the provider runs Tcpdump/Wireshark on the server, but that can only give so much data.
Just as an example, pair the VPN with Tor and the provider doesn't have much info other than the entry node connection. Rotate bridges/change guard node often, use I2P in conjunction, etc.
Also just recently Russia changed their laws about evading conscription making it a more serious offense and pretty much guaranteeing those men will not return until the Russian government is entirely replaced.