The VPN isn’t generating the requests. Other apps on your device are. Run a VPN for a while and look at data usage by app. I guarantee your VPN app will be the highest (all the other apps data gets funneled through the VPN).
Sentinel dVPN does/did the same thing. You’d connect to their network, pay a Node operator directly with the network’s coin, and you’d use their connection. Don’t know how safe it was, with respect to seeing the through-traffic, but it did work.
Did you try changing the timeout time value? I think the default is 3 seconds…