This post you are quoting seems fairly well reasoned (see Daira’s reply and subsequent thread too though).. but IMO there is not a one size fits all approach right now. People should think about their needs and wishes in relation to privacy.
People do need to understand some things before relying on critical technical systems. I hope these kind of workshops are getting people hands on and experimenting with these systems, while also benefiting the overall network, rather than immediately relying on them for their life or liberty. Same with this forum and all of it. Here some people are in (some kind of) public, trying things out again. Work out kinks and document, grow the network and participation. Future knowledge seekers and systems should benefit, even if they don’t participate.*
More technical, (from my own understanding, there are many here who know a lot! If I’m wrong about anything at all please jump in):
At the heart of it, it should be understood that zcash presently by itself does not provide network-layer privacy.
If you want to obscure your IP address…
using ‘malicious’ nodes [they will know the IP you connected from and all your command interactions, which blocks you might be interested in, and so on (there are more details here), because you’re working with the protocol and chain via their nodes]
OR non-malicious nodes [the node doesn’t log your activity, but a network observer may still have good knowledge of what IP is connecting to what, when and with which protocol, and is also seeing the transaction initiate across on the network]
…you will need an additional layer for your own privacy and anonymity.
If you run your own node, it won’t be malicious if all goes well! 
but network observers will still see the transaction gossip begin there** and if no one else is using it to make commands.. there will be a small set of users, exactly one, in fact.
If you run a node on a VPS that could a layer of obscurity too, but the issues are the same.
Zcash itself can provide a lot of privacy for you on-chain when using shielded transactions, but that is not the complete picture, as I have tried to spell out in some limited way here.
Zingolabs (among others) are working on integrating tools with the next-gen mixnet Nym, which should, theoretically, confound this level of observation to a large extent.***
*To find thanks for this situation where many of us can share tools and compare knowhow, and run them in the environment, we need only look to previous battles fought and won by people kind of like us, the good guys.
**(due to the lack of a dandelion type system as is mentioned in that post - which should add another layer of difficulty for an observer to understand everything)
***As some parting thoughts, getting everything lined up with Rust is central for having interoperability and industrial strength code. One reason we lost some old methods that were available to us is because of tech debt associated with the legacy C++ of zcashd. Also please see Online privacy and digital integrity under threat / Nym