Has anybody evaluated whole-network hardware filter+VPN solutions that filter cookies ( such as Winston https://winstonprivacy.com/ ) in the context of this article? I was planning on testing Winston at some point at my home, but Winston requires a separated modem and router as opposed to the combo box I have.

I think the declarations in the article do confuse the issue a bit - some of the benefits of a VPN such protecting against DNS logging are real but are probably not as useful to VPN marketing people as a "pitch", because they're a bit tougher to explain to laypersons.