You can often change your IP by rebooting your router. So the only way an IP ban can really work is when you start banning blocks of IPs, but that can hit other people who have no reason to be banned.

VPNs also aren’t always slower, though they often are. They change the route your packets take, which could have fewer hops to get to their destination, or could have faster connections in some places compared to your standard route.

At $20 per hour, working 40 hours a week, you would need about 25000 years to earn one billion dollars.

There’s no way anybody on Earth has put in as much effort to earn a billion dollars as 25000+ years of work.