I have my instance running on a vps behind authelia just in case the url ever gets out. I don’t track watch history so I can’t speak to that. Other than the occasional google updates and subsequent workarounds, it has been smooth sailing. Also helps that clipious works well enough both on the phone and android tv.
If you don’t want to go with the selfhosted option, there’s always freetube which will keep all your data local.
PIA upload is definitely faster than that. It doesn’t saturate my connection but I’ve seen it upload at 5MB/s+ at times. Are you sure you have the right options for the gluetun container as shown in the wiki? You’ll see the port PIA assigns you in the logs. Testing with a linux iso probably won’t help much since the ratio of seeders/leechers is high. Try a popular newly released torrent instead.
Podfetch might suit your needs.