Same as you, I also haven’t fully dipped my toes to the world of self-hosting (yet).

1. For non-animation movies/series, I wade through the popular/trending categories or read recommendation from friends, lemmy or, god forbid, reddit. I don’t really need to do this lately as my shows backlog is as long as my games backlog.
2. For convenience always. 720p is fine for me.
3. I stream. Unless it is one of my favorites I want to keep.
4. Real-debrid+Stremio.
5. Stremio does it for me. Also for anime, I have Anilist.