I have my instance running on a vps behind authelia just in case the url ever gets out. I don't track watch history so I can't speak to that. Other than the occasional google updates and subsequent workarounds, it has been smooth sailing. Also helps that clipious works well enough both on the phone and android tv.
If you don't want to go with the selfhosted option, there's always freetube which will keep all your data local.
This was my gateway into the selfhosting world. I don't think I would've kept going if it didn't make such drastic difference to my browsing experience.
I think you can consider the issue solved at this point.. Last thing to check is the cpu usage while the torrent is active. If it's being pegged, that could limit your speeds.
PIA upload is definitely faster than that. It doesn't saturate my connection but I've seen it upload at 5MB/s+ at times. Are you sure you have the right options for the gluetun container as shown in the wiki? You'll see the port PIA assigns you in the logs. Testing with a linux iso probably won't help much since the ratio of seeders/leechers is high. Try a popular newly released torrent instead.
I have the same setup but with transmission instead of qbittorrent. Make sure you map the listening port of qbittorrent to the forwarded port from pia in gluetun.
I also started with mealie and moved to tandoor for the ability to adjust the recipe when changing the portion size. Was that the feature you were thinking of?
podfetch seems to be coming along nicely. Can't see myself moving away from nextcloud anytime soon but it's nice to know there are alternatives. I use audiobookshelf for audiobooks but I found it lacking for podcast management functionality compared to antennapod.
Podfetch might suit your needs.