The VPN is to give you access to your files from anywhere, since you don’t have the storage capacity on your laptop for all of them.
If you have an encrypted connection to home, laptop storage isn’t a concern.
As a benefit, this also solves the risk of losing files that are only on the laptop, by keeping the at home.
Yea, Syncthing has it’s moments (and uses - I keep hundreds of gigs between 5 phones and 5 laptops/desktops in sync with it).
Resilio does use the bittorrent protocol, but uses keys and authorization for shares. Give it a try, it may address your need to access files remotely. I use it to access my media (about 2TB) which clearly can’t be sync’d to my laptop (or phone). I can grab any file, at any time.