Should I use Tor over a VPN, or simply use a bridge?

The official recommendation by the Tor Project regarding Tor Browser with VPN states “ While it might seem like combining a VPN with Tor would increase privacy, in practice it can reduce anonymity or break Tor’s protections if not configured correctly. ”

It further states that “ Generally speaking, we don’t recommend using a VPN with Torunless you’re an advanced user who knows how to configure both in a way that doesn’t compromise your privacy. ” then they present the Tor + VPN wiki to find more detailed information.

How I interpret these statements it doesn’t seem like the Tor Project is in a 100% anti-VPN stance when combining with Tor Browser. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have made further details with an “unless” statement to present the caveats regarding Tor + VPN.

I believe for simplicity and user-friendliness sake. They recommend using Tor Browser alone. They want to encourage and increase the use of Tor Browser to a variety of ordinary users, to normalize it and to grow their crowd of users. So that it would not be considered “suspicious” to have Tor traffic when seen by the ISP. There’s so many VPNs out there that overestimate and falsely advertise their capability that it would shoulder the research of finding a reputable one to the user and burdening them.

Here’s an old but interesting blog post published by Matt Traudt that holds the argument why VPN + Tor: Not Necessarily a Net Gain.