As for performance, I doubt processing power has anything to do with the sluggishness issues I experienced. I figure the bottleneck was the hard drives. With both programs on the same machine, if Qbittorrent is constantly searching around the hard drive for the next bit to seed, when I go to play something with Jellyfin, that hard drive is going to take a longer time to find that file I want. I definitely noticed an increase in performance when I stopped torrenting to the same hard drive that was serving my media.
With that said, I doubt symlinks (even over the network or something) would actually fix that at all. Qbittorrent would still be actually reading off of my media server's hard drives, limited by their speeds.