Depends who you are looking to protect your privacy against. VPNs encrypt all traffic between your computer and the VPN server. If you are looking to protect yourself while on a public WiFi for example, or hide your internet activities from your ISP, or any traffic outside a browser (torrenting, communication apps, phone calls, etc.), then they are a good choice. They also hide your true IP from the website or service you are connecting to. However, you have to place full trust in your VPN provider to not be spying on your traffic or keeping logs, and as I mentioned above, most people pay for their VPNs using fiat or non-anonymized crypto, meaning the VPN provider knows your real identity and can therefore link you to all your traffic. I pretty much always use a VPN for a variety of reasons, but they do not guarantee anonymity by any means.

If you want true privacy, then yes, you should be using Tor. If you connect to your VPN first and then to Tor, there is little difference in privacy over using Tor alone. If Tor is blocked in your country, or you wish to hide the fact you are using Tor from your ISP, then sure you can achieve this using a VPN, but you can also achieve this using Tor bridges +/- pluggable transports. If you connect to Tor first, and then to your VPN, then you have negated the entire point of using Tor in the first place since all your traffic will exit from the same node (your VPN provider), who will be able to see all your traffic.