I’m going to need an ELI5 because I have read several explanations online, and I still don’t fully understand what makes them different. Why would you want to use one over the other? Don’t they both just forward your internet traffic? How do they work, in general?
Just to de-analogy this a bit for clarity… with a VPN you can see that there is traffic but not what that traffic is…
The confusing thing is that the world is now running SSL by default so even with a proxy that traffic is hidden to intermediaries… so the distinction means a lot less than it once did.