That’s true. I’d only use a VPN service that’s been audited (either by a security company or, preferably, law enforcement) not to keep logs. There are only a small handful of those however. It really all depends on your needs. There are far more VPN services that do log and sell the data, and/or turn your host device into a proxy for other users/services.

Is that better or worse than giving advertisers the data point that you’re high-tech knowledgable and browse personal accounts from a server in a datacenter?

This only works if you don’t want the privacy enhancing aspect of advertisers not tying your activity to an IP address.

Beyond more safely using open Wi-Fi or bypassing a censoring ISP, there isn’t much reason there.