Tailscale have build great product around wireguard (which is quite young) and they have great marketing and docs. But they are hardly first VPN service - they might not even be the most popular one.
As far as I understand Tailscale brought NAT busting mesh networking to wireguard + identity first access control, and reduced configuration complexity. I think they were the first to think about it from an end to end user perspective, and each feature they add definitely has this spin on it. It makes it feel effortless and transparent (in both the networking use sense and cryptography sense)... So i suppose that's what I mean by started, TS was when it first really clicked for a larger group of people, it felt right.