Over the years i've torrented with no VPN, Tunnelbear, NordVPN, Mozilla VPN, and Proton; i'm pretty sure all of them messed up my torrenting in some way, not necessarily by making the connection slower, but by making some peers invisible and making me invisible to some peers.

And then there was Soulseek, which had me trying and failing to set up port forwarding. It was complicated and still didn't work as well as it would have if i didn't have a VPN.

Incidentally, i do need a VPN to torrent because i've gotten two fine-threatening letters already

I remember Nord premium had P2P servers, but the speeds where horrendous. Somewhere around 10.000 Kbits. downloading something meant that all the other programs that required bandwidth were almost unusable. I just settled on watching stuff through streams in 'meh' quality. Plus, a VPN just obscures your traffic from your ISP. But almost all mainstream VPNs have at some point either been caught or, admitted to keeping and sometimes selling backlogs. They're just as much of a leach on you wallet as any other subscription service.