for years I’ve been told that “they” target the uploaders, not the downloaders for prosecution.

Yep. Once the RIAA proved that suing individual pirates for ridiculous amounts of money over one song did nothing to stop piracy, they finally changed gears: go after the people leaking the albums, the original upload groups, etc.

Governments, watchdog groups, and industry "concerns" followed suit, so eventually everyone learned that if you weren't a part of a group, you were probably (reasonably) safe. Then they started monitoring swarms on public trackers and sending those DMCA notices en masse, but that again proved how ineffective those scare tactics were. Most people switched to private trackers to avoid that annoyance, and pirates pivoted yet again.

So seeding was significantly riskier that just downloading with uploads disabled.

Seeding wasn't the only risk. Just being in the swarm -- whether uploading or downloading -- is enough to trigger a DMCA complaint. And the way BitTorrent works, you're pretty much always seeding even if the file isn't done downloading, so downloading and not seeding wasn't enough.

VPNs are a great shield against those fishing complaints, but you wanna make sure to use one that has had to prove in court that they never keep logs. A lot of them say they don't keep logs, but happily and quietly comply to subpoenas with whatever they have on customers.