You are correct, a VPN in a non-blocked location will work just fine.
For everyday bot farms and web bugs and other automated tools that originate from a blocked country, you’ll be fine.
The hacker(s) in charge are probably not going to care or even know you are blocking them, and they certainly won’t go out of their way to make sure they can get to just one lone site somewhere who is blocking them.
In my case, for the forum I mentioned in the article, China traffic was 2nd largest, now it’s off the scale entirely.
Parking your car in the garage will stop 99% of car thieves, but of course there is still the 1% who will jump through all the hoops to steal it anyway. The methods in the article are for the 99%, not the 1%.