I just realised that "recently" happened at the end of 2018 https://blog.ipfs.io/53-go-ipfs-0-4-18/ - oops.

There was also a change later which turned off nodes being the middleman by default, but not sure which version.

It's supposed to be much better these days, but I haven't tried it again in a few months.

Ah, that agrees with my experience, I noticed the IPFS node behaving much better some time in the last year.