everybody is switching to DHT with the crackdown on public trackers
Ok, you're right so, let me explain this a little better. My original response was a little off. When I said DHT is only useful for torrents with dead trackers I misspoke. Really having those settings enabled only helps with dead or unhealthy torrents, AKA torrents that are listed on the indexing site as having 0 seeders and very few leaches. And even then having those settings enabled has rarely helped in my experience.
When you use a magnet link it uses DHT to find the peers instead of using a list of trackers in torrent files. Magnet links still work perfectly fine with the DHT settings disabled, I've been using magnet links since a certain big site disabled their trackers back in 2009 with the settings disabled in uTorrent. Disabling the DHT settings in uTorrent doesn't actually disable DHT. Instead, when you disable the DHT settings in uTorrent is stops uTorrent from generating the insane numbers of connection to find peers. Disabling those settings makes DHT stick to the connection limits you've set in your preference. So in the case of the settings I posted above it limits DHT to 15 connections per torrent instead of allowing DHT to generation the multiple hundreds of connection per torrent that it likes to do.
Yes, this means that it takes longer to find a peer and begin downloading. But the nice thing about DHT is that once you find that first peer you download all the other peers that that peer knows. And if you are downloading healthy torrents the wait isn't that long, the longest I think I've had to wait with a healthy torrent was maybe 10 minutes for it to find a peer and start downloading. So when you disable the DHT settings it will take a little longer to find peers and begin downloading, but the important thing is it it will still work and won't overload the router.