What is this useful for beyond a convenient aid to evade IP-based abuse detection, "safely" trolling in general, and browsing something like an xchan site?

(I'm curious because these are the only practical possibilities which come to mind, feels like I must be missing something)

It could help evade IP-based user profiling (if you research sensitive topics incognito)

Good one, thank you kindly!

When you say “trolling”, do you mean “saying an inconvenient truth”? What does constant identification serve, apart from keeping people in ignorance?

I mean trolling of the sort my younger, immature self would have used this tool for: an optimal workflow for wreaking unblockable havoc against some poor website without even disrupting my main browsing session.

If that's what your younger immature self wanted to do, I don't see why the browser should get in the way.

> What is this useful for beyond

Privacy and peace of mind are goals on themselves

Preventing your ISP from spying on you.

Yeah, that's one reason. At least with a VPN/VPS, you can choose who's spying on you, instead of the local monopoly.

Consider that it's pretty common for websites to block entire countries by IP these days, yet people from these countries still have a need for that content.

FYI: After reading your post I installed it and found this AWS how-to:

https://github.com/jameswmccarty/aws-socks5-proxy

...since I'm already using an EC2 instance for my own personal stuff.

Whats the advantage of this over routing all traffic through tailscale/wireguard in AWS?

For me, lower cost: I'm already paying for an EC2 instance so the incremental cost of the routing bandwidth is negligable compared to the cost of a new ts/wg service.