They can be useful for hiding your internet activity from your ISP or people on your WiFi network if the VPN is more trustworthy than your regular network, however they simply do not make you anonymous to most services you are using. Cookies, browser fingerprinting, tracking and hardware IDs are much more accurate in identifying and tracking you than an IP address. Even if the VPN is trustworthy and not spying on you and there are no attackers spying either, most of the time the services and website you are using have much more effective ways of tracking you than your IP address and a VPN does exactly nothing against them. This is not even the biggest problem regarding anonymity and VPNs.
Furthermore VPNs are an easier target to more advanced attacks on your anonymity like traffic correlation attacks than Tor is. If an attacker gains access to the VPN server you are using they will be able to see and track your activity. Even if the VPN is not spying on you, you still have to trust it to secure its infrastructure against attacks. Additionally VPNs are a single point of failure. So even an audit by an independent company cannot guarantee the VPN is keeping its own promises and policy.
At any time the VPN can start or stop recording information about your activity. You have to trust the VPN not to keep any records of your activity without any guarantee for it. The VPN will see everything your ISP used to see and while sites you connect to won't know your IP address, the VPN will know your real IP address and which sites you visited. However this does not solve the problem of your traffic being traceable, it just shifts it to the VPN. A VPN simply routes your traffic through a VPN server hiding your IP address from the sites you visit and your internet activity from your ISP and others watching your connection. Tor Browser does a lot more than a VPN and provides way stronger anonymity.
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