Yup, it's a much welcome respite, but I'll spend all of it farming upgrades for my core units because I don't trust Hoyo to not pull another 3.7 on us soon. Won't hurt to be fully prepared.
I'm having a good time even on an 11th gen mobile Intel processor with its iGPU. For more demanding games I use FSR to get much more bang for buck from the iGPU, on Linux it's pretty easy to activate in almost any game. On a side note, Waydroid (with libhoudini) also has excellent performance on this setup.
It's mostly torrents that are dangerous without a VPN, since as a torrent user you're also redistributing the content in question, and the peer-to-peer nature of them makes you very visible to copyright trolls.
Direct download is generally much safer. Specifics vary by jurisdiction, but in many countries merely downloading (or streaming) a pirated copy of a game or film is not a criminal offense, and is not in practice vulnerable to a civil lawsuit either.
Avoid torrents, know good direct download sites (these will vary by what content you're interested in, look around using various search engines to get around DMCA delistings), use rudimentary privacy protections like private DNS and HTTPS-only mode in your browser, and you'll get far without a VPN.
Tor is also a powerful, free option, but it's generally overkill for non-torrent piracy and very hard to configure for torrents.
Kyoukai no Kanata ED drops even more powerfully in the film version.