I wouldn't believe any corporation who says this. A profile of a self-identified private person's traffic is likely worth a lot more than what a niche audience will pay for privacy.

VPNs have a history of lying about their business models, about how private their service really is. International contract enforcement won't exactly leave you with a lot of leverage if (pragmatically, when) they lie to you.

And merely being international certainly won't stop a state level actor who is intent on gaining access to your traffic.

Many of the VPN providers are suspiciously cheap.

If a no-name company starts selling suspiciously cheap smartphones, the odds of those smartphones being backdoored/stolen/broken goes up pretty dramatically. That doesn't mean that every company selling smartphones is equally untrustworthy.

Of course it's a problem how hard it is to tell if a VPN company is trustworthy, but that's a problem that exists for almost every 3rd-party relationship I enter into.