I have two W11 PCs, one a tower in my office, the other a NUC in my lounge. They are both connected to my router via CAT cables. I have Microsoft One Drive with my subscription giving me 6 x 1TB storage for each 'member' of my family.
In my tower I have a 1TB Samsung SSD which is my One Drive folder ie all my docs,photos, music, videos, software,etc etc are sent there. I can decide which files are kept locally or just up on the Cloud. This SSD is backed up to a 1TB WD HDD via Aeomi Backupper.
When I download something via BitTorrent I can say to which folder it is saved and obviously all movies go to my VIDEO folder. This drive is shared on my network, so I can access files from my other NUC PC, and even on my FireTV stick via VLC, and on my Android phone which I have OneDrive installed. Files CAN be saved on my NUC, but as I have a 1Gb/s internet I don't bother. So I can watch any downloaded content on any of my devices almost instantly. And I personally have 1TB of storage, plenty because, I like you, delete stuff I have watched.
It all works very well.