As someone who’s had a single-user Mastodon instance for two years now: I love it. It’s definitely not for everyone, for reasons mainly stated in the article. However, if you like a more personal, highly-curated federated timeline, a single-user instance is great.
I 90% use Mastodon to keep up with my friends’ posts and see art and animal pictures (and I hate interacting with strangers LOL), so I curate my instance to only subscribe to them. For the remaining 10%, I have a secondary account on a larger instance for when I want to read the news etc. It’s worked well for me, but again, it’s surely not for everyone!
Seconding Stremio! Just had to install the Torrentio add-on and even my tech-challenged mom can use it on her Android TV with no problems. I also got her a RealDebrid account (9 EUR/6 months iirc, completely optional) so she doesn’t have to deal with torrent seeds etc.