Unfortunately something like it is needed to stop bots. The reason why Lemmy isn’t completely overrun by bots and spam is because the big instances run Cloudflare in the background and require a captcha to sign up.

Write a guide on installing uBlock Origin, installing qBittorrent, signing up for a VPN, then binding qBittorrent to the VPN.

That isn’t illegal and will have purposes other than piracy.

It is open source. https://github.com/subhra74/xdm-integration-module

Windscribe and Proton are also free but they’re much faster. I recommend trying them first.

Paiphon and Windscribe are good. The former gives you unlimited data, while the latter only provides 10 GB per month but has a court tested no logs policy.

I use XDM. It’s open source, has no ads or other shit, and it will download almost any DRM-free video on a web page.