Do you use a proxy server through the settings, or just turn on your VPN and run it while torrenting?
I use Nord, and with the former method I was having issues. I reported it in an issue on the GitHub, and even contacted Nord for support. Now, there does seem to be a lot of down time with the regular method, but with the proxy (“better” method normally) there was times where it was exactly as you described- tons of seeds or leeches, but no connections, uploads, or downloads across the board.
In the execution log, there was an error that’d pop up repeatedly. I can’t remember or see at the moment what that error is, something about SOCKS5, the proxy connection. But after popping 5-10 times, that’s when everything would hit zeroes. I would have to close and reopen qBittorrent to get it to start again. When I used uTorrent before, I never had these issues, so I was thinking about moving on to some other torrent application. Wanting to stay with Open Source programs kept me for now.