Its remarkable that a project that had almost a decade of work was bought out by a cryptocoin launched 6 months ago.

he's also working on his own cryptocurrency, so there's that...

I haven't kept up with those news. As a torent user (through a different client, I use qbittorrent) is there anything I should be wary of?

Nope, BitTorrent, Inc. is just as scummy as its new owners. Both of the proprietary(!) clients it distributes, BitTorrent and uTorrent, are loaded with adware and other garbage. The inventor of the open-source BitTorrent protocol we all know and love, Bram Cohen[0], already left the company late last year to start another company, Chia.Network[1], which is yet another cryptocurrency company.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen [1]https://chia.net

Probably not using Bittorrent itself is sufficient. I would also be wary of their Sync application.