No? I just download what I want and try to seed it 1:1 (which is hard on private).
Maybe in the beginning you need to do it to build up buffer and not download yourself into a leech-role.
But once (my threshold is about 1:250gb (down/up) in ratio) built up, you can just coast along provided you arent downloading every remux you come across.

And the racing is a serious issue, yes.
BUT even I can't compete even with my gbit upload because I am limited by HDDs and the serious ratio farmers use SSDs.

If I seed stuff it usually comes out to 2-10 mbps for maybe 2,3,4 minutes and that's it.
Only the very large (>200GB) torrents are leeched of for longer from me. Probably because so few do continue to seed those behemoths.

I'm running 24/7, I've got one torrent running for 2 years with a ratio of 10 (and not even a small one) while most things get 0 kB up in even a year.

I have torrents from a tracker that is particular hard to build ratio on.
Seeding since 2022 and a ratio of .6
Heres more:

So no, a seedbox is not the ultimate cheat you make it out to be.
But it helps circumventing the networking issues :-)