That would be up to the courts to decide.

It’s very easy to accidentally connect to an unknown server, so it would depend on your state’s criteria for determining guilt.

Sometimes.

They can keep a record of VPNs and monitor if you connect to their servers, or block that connection altogether.

The problem with this is that new VPNs come and go all the time and active VPNs don’t always have static configurations. It would be impossible for them to reliably track all of them.

“Making VPNs illegal” doesn’t stop you from using them.

They would have to implement north korea/iran levels of restrictions in order to prevent you from using VPNs.