They do indeed

With opnwrt you can do DNS hijacking, where you force redirect DNS requests for other servers to your own DNS server. This works as long as they aren’t encrypted (DNS over HTTPS or TLS), which most devices don’t use.

Sometimes you’re just not very hungry.

I almost did this for a different reason, people choose python because it has some pretty good web automation/scraping libraries to work with.

Yes, ProtonVPN still provides port forwarding. They randomly assign you a single port every time you connect, so you’ll have to update the settings in qB occasionally, but it’s manageable.

Auto injected context-aware ads are becoming increasingly common these days. Lots of podcast providers will use your IP or user information (if available) to select ads for your area or personal data and and they’ll splice it into your download. It almost always interrupts the flow of discussions but the ones I’ve heard are at least usually good enough to happen at the end of sentences and not mid sentence or mid word.

Call it Tapestry

There were a couple questions about that here where the admin said they disabled it because they expected people to chat on Matrix instead. I imagine that’s easier to moderate etc but it would’ve definitely been more user friendly to have the built in one.

Alternatively Lichess which is FOSS (and can be found on fdroid)