Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I think it's generally recommended if you are security conscious to manually forward ports rather than allow uPnP to be enabled on your router. There's been cases where IoT devices or apps can open sensitive ports to your network without your knowledge. And the uPnP protocol itself was found to be flawed a few years ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/06/upnp-flaw-exposes-millions-of-network-devices-to-attacks-over-the-internet/

Çadırcı reported his findings to the Open Connectivity Foundation, which maintains the UPnP protocol, and the foundation has updated the underlying specification to fix the flaw. Users can check with developers and manufacturers to find out if or when a patch will be available. A significant percentage of IoT devices never receive updates from manufacturers, which means the vulnerability will live on for some time to come.

But you know, it depends on your risk profile. For most people, it's probably fine. Depends how paranoid you want to get.

Binding your VPN connection to qbittorrent is a good idea, for sure, if you use a VPN. I usually keep DHT enabled with a bound VPN connection and a manually forwarded port using Proton VPN. I'm going to try out anonymous mode to see if it affects speeds any, since it looks like it doesn't impact uploads or connections any more. That's a bonus :)