How is the Piracy community adapting to port forwarding becoming a rarer premium feature, and most users on public trackers do not have it? Is the bitorrent protocol in need of update?
yes, seeding works too, with no port forwarding. With mullvad, it just works and with proton I have to enable "moderate NAT" sometimes, but seeding works without port forwarding, it always has
You're opening a port in your VPN connection so no there's no "huge vulnerability" (even without a VPN you're only opening a port to your torrent client) and as mentioned, you're only seeding to people who have port forwarding set up. If more people run without it like yourself, the whole system breaks down.
I just said twice that everything works fine as long as "direct" connections can be made. if your torrenting client says that's happening, everything is working fine
Partially, it's accurate when using the BT protocol. However if you use μTP (Micro Transport Protocol), it has “support for NAT traversal using UDP hole punching between two port-restricted peers where a third unrestricted peer acts as a STUN server.”