The latter. Seedboxes are becoming more popular these days, which might be good for future torrent preservation. But if you have a niche or old school taste, you are gonna have a hard time without port forwarding.

Torrenting, can reach more peers. Especially helpful for older, less popular torrents.

I knew about DV not working. But how about regular HDR? I’m interested in going this route but would prefer to keep HDR.

Seems to me YT is just blocking the instances so they have to move their servers constantly. Big or small instances, both get blocked every few days. Thankfully there are enough instances, so you can always hop. But it does require more intervention than Invidious, which doesn’t proxy your requests to Google.