I pay the $20 per year and use it as a backup for my local and vps wireguard/pihole installs. Works great and you can use custom local dns records for your Lan if you wish. Plus you can use it on android/ios without any extra software installs.
IRC is fine to get your movie and TV needs met. There are a couple servers doing it well. Speeds are decent enough, a few minutes per 8-9 gig files. Retention sucks, as pretty rapid turn-over is basically required; these are files hosted on dedis/vps's with finite disk space.
You should be able to find most stuff released with-in the last year without too much effort.
Also, some servers offer request credits in exchange for downloads, so you can ask for more niche or rare content. Happy hunting!
So I just saw this on hacker news https://hostingyourgif.live/ Might be of interest