I think I read somewhere that the majority of views typically come from videos being recommended on users’ home pages. That is the reason why content creators focus so much on the youtube algorithm, since if their videos don’t get recommended, they don’t get as many views.

(I haven’t watched the linked video, so that may be exactly what they talk about)

You could get an arch based distro and let the distro maintainers handle it. I use EndeavourOS and its been great for the past 3 years

I had a dual gpu Dell Xps laptop a couple of years ago, and the best experience I had with it was PopOS. It was the only distro that worked with that laptop out of the box without just completely disabling the dgpu.

You can’t get around not having a VPN if you don’t want your ISP to know you are doing. Sounds like you might not have a complete idea of what exactly a VPN is doing and why you need one.