qBittorrent official forums

1. Is using an ip filter list still recommended, I remembered using Bluetack's list but don't know if it still makes sense today.

I definitely believe it is a good idea and I just got done looking all over for an IPfilter.dat that will work with qBittorrent and OS X.
What I ended up doing was downloading IPfilter Updater on a windows computer, installing it, and copying/pasting the ipfilter.dat to my Mac computer.
https://davidmoore.github.io/ipfilter/

So far it's working. Good luck!