Thanks for the reply!

For the main points that he's making, I agree with you. Basically people just need to make sure they're using encryption and not counting on the network protocols for privacy.

The one thing that I think VPN + TLS would not protect against is denial of service or routing protocol attacks by a vendor under the control of a foreign government (He used Huawei as an example). But of course, that's the same for all networks, not just 5G.