It's still hard to tell what's going on here because both parties only seem interested in depicting the other as evil.
Level3 blames Verizon. There's some nasty stuff going on there if what they say is true. But none of it uniquely affects Netflix, it affects all Level3 customers. This is the kind of network management that the FCC has declined to intervene in.
They claimed that Verizon literally unplugged half the connections between two networks that are only half congested.
Presumably, if they added more links, the connection to that Netflix server (among other Level3 customers) would go up, but it couldn't do any better than double. (Bitrates might more than double now that there's no packet retransmissions, but it probably wouldn't increase an order of magnitude, which is what the VPN user claims.)
If a VPN really is faster, then Netflix clearly has access to unused capacity via other routes that they're not providing to customers. That is, the VPN is just doing the routing that Netflix isn't doing.
Either that, or the VPN customer is accessing the same Netflix server, which would make the VPN story is a lie, because VPN, of course, doesn't let you blast through network congestion.
Regardless, none of the accusations claim Net Neutrality violations.