Yes you must have a login... but setting up a VPS is literally a button click these days, it's not going to be much more complicated. no need to even login to an interactive shell to configure anything (or at the most `adduser` if there are no default non roots), all you need is a user name and password, any of the generic VPS images will work no configuration beyond an ssh user.
It's almost as simple, faster, and importantly, far more obscure... vs consumer VPNs which are almost honey pots.
It's also more powerful, you can selectively route things through different servers simultaneously.
This also ties your identity to a provider definitively. That's fine, as long as you tell people that's what is happening. A good consumer VPN that isn't a garbage one offers plausible deniability.
If you want to have any hope of anonymity when accessing the internet, use Tor. Don't use a single-hop proxy. Even if you assume that the VPN provider is trustworthy and won't roll over when they're handed an NSL (a questionable assumption), intelligence agencies can just as easily break into all the servers (owned by a single party) and log the traffic themselves. Personally, I would be surprised if they haven't already done this for some providers -- why wouldn't they?
Yes this is true, it really depends what you want from your VPN. For security and anti-cencorship this works, among many other useful things that you can't do with a normal VPN - but if you are evading authorities or something then you cannot be personally associated with the server.
I suppose that negates my point about it's obscurity, since you only care about that if you are evading prying eyes of some sort.
I've updated my original comment to include your point.
It's almost as simple, faster, and importantly, far more obscure... vs consumer VPNs which are almost honey pots.
It's also more powerful, you can selectively route things through different servers simultaneously.