Is it less effective, though? From what I remember about successes e.g. against organized crime or other groups that operated partially or totally over the internet in the news over the last years, it was mostly the simple and dull ~~physical~~ police work that leveraged mistakes of operational security, but not an evaluation of minable data (even when learned in hindsight that it existed).
E.g. looking at the logs of relevant servers and waiting for someone to login without their VPN at some point.
E.g. looking at the logs of relevant servers and waiting for someone to login without their VPN at some point.