Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Really depends on where you live honestly. Just make sure you're not the lowest hanging fruit. I use a VPN to torrent but cba using a vpn to access indexers for example.

And when choosing a VPN server location? Just anything that's not my country. If anything happens they'll just attach to a swarm and grab all the IPs belonging to their 'jurisdiction' and ask the ISP's for PII. My VPN is in Estonia so they'll probably skip it.

1. It can't hurt (it's a form of defense in depth) but it's unlikely unless you're torrenting ISIS recruitment videos or stolen CIA secrets or something.
2. Using Bitcoin doesn't help in practice unless you are able to buy the bitcoin anonymously. Most people these days use exchanges that verify your identity. Somebody investigating you can only ask the seedbox for your contact info with a subpoena, and if they get that far, they will just go one extra step to subpoena the exchange you bought the BTC from. (edited to add: a prepaid credit card bought with cash, or cash by mail itself, is probably more anonymous than BTC.)
3. Depends on jurisdiction, what you are sharing, how litigious the copyright holders are, your prior criminal record, and any number of other factors. Do some research on google for cases in your jurisdiction.
4. They do have resources, logs about swarms they join, and can act on that in the future even if they don't right away. So it is better to be paranoid than to not be, because a mistake you make now can come to bite you in the future, but being too paranoid isn't likely to be a problem. That said, the risk is minimal for the use cases we talk about here like TV and music.

Probably overkill but more protection doesnt hurt (except potentially more money & time used on this). bitcoin can be swapped to monero and then used to pay anonymously

I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble unless they're seeding without a VPN from their home network. I have a seedbox and just keep seeding until my storage fills up, then I run a purge of well-seeded content.

if there's something important that I'm missing, please let me know!

Do note that some private trackers (do you have communities dedicated to trackers here?) require you to access from a residential network. They say they'll ban you if you use a VPN or tor or whatever:

1. Some seedboxes give you VPN access for free that uses the same machine and IP that the seedbox is using
2. It's usually pretty obvious when looking up IP addresses whether they're residential or commercial
3. I've never seen anyone banned for VPN use on a private tracker, but I've never been social on private trackers (sometimes people get banned for "no reason," and there's always a chance this was the reason)