Sorry if this has been asked before but I couldnt find any good reasonable answer. So from my current understandings, every requests you made from your laptop needs to be sent to the access point first (router) and when you connect to a VPN, this requests are sent from the access point to the VPN server to be encrypted.
So how does this stop someone from doing a MITM attack between the access point and your devices? Or between the access point and the vpn server?
If someone is sitting between you and your router, then they will be able to get your data by using any sniffer. Once the connection is made from your router to vpn concentrator( vpn server), then they will be seeing only encrypted data which is of no value to the attacker.
It protects your traffic between your device and the VPN gateway, preventing your ISP (or most governments) from performing a MiTM attack targeted toward you.
However, once your traffic passes from the VPN gateway to its eventual destination, it becomes vulnerable to a MiTM attack. With a VPN, your traffic is then semi-anonymized, so it is much much more difficult to target any attack toward any particular person, but an indescriminate attack against all users of a particular website is still very possible.
The best answer to your question is defined in the link below:
https://www.beencrypted.com/vpn/vpn-encryption-guide/
As you know the MITM attack mechanism, so understanding different types of VPN can help you choose the most related one to your activity.
