Not necessarily. Granted installing the Tor browser will set up the services/daemons and access to the appropriate ports in the background, but generally the Tor protocol has a lot more going on than a VPN.

Additionally a VPN can be had for free from certain services like ProtonVPN. It’s not as fast as a paid VPN service, but during lower traffic times it’ll suffice. Plus if you know how to torrent over a VPN, then you just download the vids that way and you don’t need internet access every time you want to watch it.

This plus using CLI tools like yt-dlp on sites like pornhub, xhamster, etc, and you really start to realize how ineffective bullshit laws like these are for increasingly more technically savvy youths.

the step of paying? lol. i’m not sure that constitutes difficulty.