It's been a couple years since I set it up so I couldn't tell you what's the best deal these days.
I use Newsdemon's 2tb/mo plan (Black Friday deal, it's almost free it was so cheap) and a Blocknews block for completion. I don't have any issues with downloads being incomplete but YMMV.
Nzbgeek indexer (lifetime sub), Sabnzbd downloader, and the full *arr suite for automation, and an Emby server running on my NAS.
I'd rather pay for a decent Usenet backbone and use exclusively SSL downloads than rely on a VPN with torrents.
You don't want a free VPN. I'd cough up for Mullvad if I was going that route.
Check out Syncthing. It works pretty painlessly.
The Youths™ prefer short attention span, rapid gratification things like TikTok/Snapchat/Instagram/Facebook video reels... generally.
Cursive with the oddball printing letter thrown in will always be my preference. It's just plain faster than printing.
Gaming works surprisingly well. The last few years have made it a one-click affair for thousands of games with the efforts of the Proton team.
The only reason I haven't is the Pixel OS specific feature set like being able to use text selection/OCR from the task switcher.
Pixel 7. I bought it with the intention of flashing it with Graphene OS or something along those lines but I enjoy the Pixel features so much that I've left it stock.
As long as you don't live in Flint, USA water is generally safe to drink from the tap.
I just looked at the current offerings from Newsdemon and the deals are not nearly as sweet as the plan I'm on. I suspect that your best bet for a long-term subscription would be to wait until Black Friday, but there are plenty of providers with cheap blocks or monthly plans to play around with.