I know, I’m just trying to speak in generalities for the sake of clarity.

It hides traffic from your ISP or cellular provider. Who are monitoring your traffic and location and selling that information in aggregate to 3rd parties.

It also conceals your location from websites and makes it a little harder to ID you. Websites have other methods of identifying you, cookies, device specs, the type of browser you’re using, patterns of usage, ect ect. Hiding your IP takes one point of data away from them but is basically useless if you’re not taking other steps like disabling certain browser functionality.

I found that a lot of sites will throw a lot more of a fit from VPN usage on a mobile device than they do from a desktop.