Yes.
Using a VPN for all your traffic obscures your usage and hinders surveillance by your internet provider. If you ssh directly to your server, thatโs one extra bit of information (that youโre sshโing into the server) your internet provider has about you. Whether this is significant or useful to the provider is questionable, but the short answer is โyes, it provides more security.โ That said, AI is probably being already used to do pattern analysis on traffic, and they might still be able to tell youโre making an ssh connection, unless youโre also constantly streaming through the VPN, too.
Iโm going to get heat for this, but running a bitcoin wallet on your home computer - whether or not you actually have any coins or are mining - is a great way to generate a variable amount of constant traffic to an endpoint. Hosting a public IPFS, web site, torrent seeds, or Freenet node are also good ways, although some of those require opening ports to inbound connections and could invite attacks.