I've become an expert at spotting traffic lights in America now, so that's a plus

Generally I don't bother with VPN, though I sometimes use the Opera browser with its VPN lite approach.

Most sites I block things, generally it is automatic with the Brave browser, but some I have to allow or I get annoying issues with important elements.

I use Facebook once every month or five, so rarely in other words. Usually I just look over my wife's shoulder with family etc stuff in Messenger. One of my kid's and his partner live interstate, as do a bunch of other relatives and friends. I do hate several aspects of Facebook though ... great concept, poor execution.

Most youtube clips play poorly in a browser I find, certainly mine on this PC. They play pretty good with the free mpv.exe program though, using the free youtube-dl.exe program with it. I've written a program to make that as easy as, called MPV Assistant. Using it is as simple as copying the youtube video URL and starting my assistant, which grabs the link from the clipboard, then I click PLAY. I can change the quality before that if I wish. The mpv.exe program is so bare bones, it uses the least amount of resources of any video player. It does rather rely on control via hotkeys, which my assistant also helps with.

I suspect the VPN is my main problem with getting captchas.

That looks good, I'd have a try of it if I was still using Windows. I already use youtube_dl and mpv but not in such a convenient way!