@nyltak I actually made a long post yesterday I think it was. And I provided a variety of links to official comments and post regarding some of these. If you would like to check out that post I did link to where you can see their responses on GitHub as well as a few other places which do talk about things like the VPN as well. Which I even found that GitHub link by searching through these forms as well. Maybe that will be a nice little start for you.
As to the VPN, I didn’t say it has to be the same state but it does have to be the same time zone as your IP address and everything. I’m actually in the middle of something right now so I’m just doing a quick voice to text response from my phone. But I hope you will check out the link that I’ve provided and then even follow the mini links that was included in that which might help you to understand a little bit more some of the troubleshooting stops and things that can interfere with ads.