What's wrong with VPN + Tor combination? Why do you think that it's better idea to run Tor alone? Overall, people rarely use Tor and the overall wide experience and widespread information is that Tor is used to access darkweb. I know not everyone uses it for that purpose but that's not what government thinks and expects from an average user, everyone thinks about darkwebs. So, if you use Tor, then your ISP knows that you are using Tor and you are probably in their list, you look suspicious for them. But VPN is used by a lot of people, some use it to unlock PlayStore apps, some use it for watching Netflix/AmzPrime/Hulu/Disney+, some use it for gaming and so on. I mean, the number of VPN users is very high, a lot of average person and especially kids use VPN, so, they definitely won't track everyone who uses VPN. That's why I think it's better to connect to VPN, configure it, then connect to Tor. When it comes to trust, I think I would trust some VPN providers over my internet service provider.
That's an excessive generalization. There is a reason why most people who are truly concerned about their privacy don't use VPNs. There are tons of ways for people to compromise their privacy when they're using VPN. It really doesn't matter what your government thinks about your habits, you have the rights to maintain and protect your own privacy and they shouldn't have any problems with that. So long as your Tor connection is secure enough such that nothing is leaked.
VPNs on the contrary, doesn't provide sufficient privacy. Your VPN client can leak information if not configured properly, the addition of an additional eavedropper in your connection, the possibility of the data being analyzed, so on and so forth. ISPs will absolutely track and collect your metadata no matter what you do, like what NSA has always been doing.