I think it depends what you’re trying to hide. With HTTPS, the network (and potentially hackers) can see which sites you’re visiting, but not much else.
With a VPN, they can only really see you’re connecting to a VPN. Either ways, with modern banking applications you should be fine on public wifi for security purposes unless your threat model is fairly high.
What is a problem though is the companies running these hotspots selling usage data, and potentially tracking your activity through you interacting with these wifi networks. MAC address randomisation should partially protect against this.