On the other hand I have seen a guide from a Swedish university library with a "the dark side" section recommending Scihub, #icanhazpdf and /r/scholar. The contract between Elsevier and pretty much all Swedish universities was canceled a year ago and they seem to be fine.
Nice to hear that my experience was the exception and not the rule! I'm pretty happy with my current solution combining a cheap VPS in the Netherlands for the "I need a server to put some files on" usecase and (encrypted) backups to Backblaze B2, but I'll keep it in mind if I ever need some storage in the US :)
I had a pretty underwhelming experience with rsync.net and their cheaper version without snapshots a year ago. Speeds where initially 1MB/s on a gigabit connection between Sweden and their Switzerland location. After complaining they exempted me from traffic shaping and I got 2-4MB/s instead.
Have you tried enabling more threads (add -o b2.connections=$number)? It improved enough to make it ok for my (admittedly tiny) backup needs. The process of creating a new snapshot is still really slow though, but I'm not sure that is B2's fault.