It’s really not that bad unless you really don’t want to be found. Most DMCA/copyright firms just do a basic investigation which stops at the IP AFAIK.

Mullvad and I’m sure other modern VPN clients have “kill switches” built-in that shuts down traffic if the tunnel isn’t on. You can also do a leak check before starting anything up.

Unfortunately Mullvad and the majority of VPN providers don't offer port-forwarding anymore, last year when I checked only a couple, maybe three remained...

Having wrote that, another option, under Linux with network namespaces and Wireguard it's possible to have a pretty fail proof VPN...

Wouldn’t seedboxes be far more dangerous? The provider absolutely can see what you are doing on the box and provide that to the authorities whereas a VPN provider that doesn’t log activity, well there’s no paper trail at least retroactively.

Why do you trust VPN providers more than seedbox providers?

Mullvad and Proton at least have had their privacy claims tested by European courts, they really don't have much info on you. And conceptually it is obvious that a hosting provider could provide more information about a permanent activity than a networking provider could provide about a transient one.