Another data point: I was at Doha airport recently and logged into their public WiFi. Unfortunately, they seemed to be MitM'ing certain connections, mostly to well-known domains. To work around this, I tried setting up Mullvad (which I had used occasionally in the past) but they downgraded Mullvad.net to HTTP, too. Thankfully, I had Tailscale already set up and I could easily book their Mullvad package and add Mullvad as an exit node to my Tailnet. Problem solved.
Tunnelling into my home machine I was able to access the account and transfer money I needed.
Sure a VPN might be able to do this too but it’s nice being able to exit via a connection you control.
I can also watch Plex movies without exposing ports.