The latter. Seedboxes are becoming more popular these days, which might be good for future torrent preservation. But if you have a niche or old school taste, you are gonna have a hard time without port forwarding.

Torrenting, can reach more peers. Especially helpful for older, less popular torrents.

Not entirely true, I’m running Ubuntu on MBP 2017 (non-Touchbar). WiFi works out of the box, only touchbar models have problems. They are using another antenna. Only thing that doesn’t work out of the box are FaceTime webcam and sound. There are drivers for those. One thing to note tho, Intel MBP especially those thin ones can get very hot and fans might blast.