Your rationale for going Pop was my exact one. I knew I wanted the bleeding edge, but this was a device I was going to (mostly) daily drive. I wanted it to be reliable. And Pop fixed that for me and didn’t force my hand with shoving Snaps down my throat.
Glad to have another join the ranks!
What do you use as a torrenting client? Most popular ones give you the ability to choose a specific interface over which it will allow incoming/outgoing connections to other peers. Your ProtonVPN should have its own interface you can select from your client. That should make it much less likely for that to happen again if Proton crashes, since if Proton crashes, that network interface disconnects.