I get where you are coming from, however it’s important to remember that big players are not equal - they have really, really different people in the leadership. Elmo is just a too-big-to-fall clown with insane ego, spez is a manchild who took VC money like there’s no tomorrow and in the end had no idea how to provide ROI, but youtube is ran by very competent people with solid track record and deep pockets.

Maybe they are not too innovative business-wise recently… but they are good at catching up (except live streaming - screen layout is dogshit and nobody wants to get hyped in their tiny chatbox from a fucking google account with family photo as an avatar) and at leveraging what they already have, which is quite a lot, tbh.

Yt makes a series of bad decisions

It’s not like it’s making any bad decisions right now. Pretty calculated, I’d say - they feel safe market-wise, so they can increase amount of ads/fight ad-blockers/push people to buy subscription.

I run flood together with qbittorrent, looks great everywhere.

you need to set up port forwarding not only with your vpn provider, but also with gluetun:

https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun-wiki/blob/main/setup/advanced/vpn-port-forwarding.md

there’s a lot of different C’s out there - I mean coding for microcontrollers looks really different to coding graphics with opengl, for example, especially for a beginner.
What do you want to do achieve with C specifically?

C#

eh… those are fundamentally different, C is not object-oriented so OOD part goes straight out of the window. The only thing similar about them is syntax to some degree (which is really irrelevant), approach is completely different.