History
In the mid-2010s, programmers in China had a problem. Shadowsocks was no longer coping: DPI systems had learned to identify it. In 2015 a developer under the alias Lance introduced V2Ray as part of Project V. It wasn't just a program, but an entire open-source platform for building communication networks.
The story of its creator is mysterious — in 2019 Victoria disappeared from all social networks and messengers, leaving the code to the community. But the project didn't die; on the contrary, it grew forks and became the de facto standard for bypassing censorship.
Advantages
Inside V2Ray you can use VMess, Shadowsocks, SOCKS, HTTP, Trojan, and VLESS. V2Ray can disguise itself: its traffic can be wrapped in WebSocket, layered with TLS, and hidden behind an ordinary website.
The second killer feature is flexible routing. You can set rules: "YouTube and Netflix go through a US proxy server, while banking and government services go direct."
Disadvantages
The main pain of V2Ray is setup complexity. The JSON configuration file resembles a spaceship. Official support for the original core has effectively died. The community picked up the project (the V2Fly fork), but now all innovation goes to Xray.
Summary
V2Ray is the Swiss Army knife for bypassing censorship. It's powerful, flexible, and can do almost everything. But it requires manual configuration, and its original version is no longer developed.