You have to use Tails
You have to use Tails or you are doing it wrong
What Tails is good at
It runs from removable media, keeps nothing between sessions unless you tell it to, and routes everything through Tor rather than leaving that to individual applications. Those are real properties and they close real gaps, particularly leaving nothing behind on the machine you used.
Why the claim is only partly right
Because it is presented as the first step, and as a first step it is badly ordered. Somebody who boots Tails and then accepts an address from a forum without checking a signature has protected the wrong thing. The operating system is not what a phishing page attacks.
The failure modes that actually cost people accounts are landing on a clone, reusing a password, skipping verification, and acting quickly during an outage. Tails prevents none of those. It addresses a different category of risk that matters much more to some people than others.
Who it is genuinely for
| Situation | Does Tails help much? |
|---|---|
| Shared or family computer | Yes, substantially. Leaving nothing behind is the whole problem there. |
| A managed or work device | Yes, and the honest answer is not to do this at all on a device you do not control. |
| Your own machine, occasional use | Some, and less than the effort suggests. |
| Frequent use, higher exposure | Yes. At that level the leftover traces are worth eliminating. |
| Somebody who will not verify signatures | No. The gap is elsewhere and Tails does not touch it. |
The harm in the way it is stated
Presenting it as mandatory produces two bad outcomes. Some people are put off entirely by a requirement that sounds like a weekend project, and go and do the same activity with no precautions at all. Others install it, feel finished, and skip the cheaper steps that would have protected them.
The second is the more common and the more expensive. A strong tool used as a substitute for a basic habit is worse than the basic habit alone, because it supplies confidence the habit would not have supplied.
The honest ranking: verify signatures, use unique credentials, keep no parked balance, use Tor Browser properly. Then, if your situation calls for it, Tails.