I see no deception or nothing misleading about the service they provide. The fact that you need to trust them more than your ISP and country's network is not unclear to anyone, they even advertise "no log" because obviously they can log if they choose to.
It is preposterous that you call them snake oil when there are so many discoveries about ISPs doing mitm on their own behalf or governments and even in the US/west it is a default that they will sale your location and address along other things as a service. You have no choice in the matter because they are monopolies. It is a simple risk calculation that if I trusr some rando vpn provider over my last-mile or country/locality network I can pay to use them to move my trust boundary to their servers. Now marketers and other hostile parties can buy my metadata from a myriad of VPN providers who all risk to lose their whole business if that deal was ever exposed (unlike ISPs).
SOMEONE should be punished for this because it's effectively a lie. This is the only way we will actually improve the bad situation you're talking about.
What are VPN services SOLD AS? If they promise something and do not do that thing, then this is a problem. They should be sued or regulated or similar, and they shouldn't be able to get around that, even based on techinical definitions.