@ianfontinell-0 Thank you again for your explanation. I appreciate the thoroughness and time you invest in answering questions, not only on this topic but so many others. If there were an award for "Hero of the Forum," you would get it.
Back to this specific topic, and using more metaphorical and less numerical mind, it sounds like when someone downloads the 30 GB torrent spoken about above, at first the Windows OS "fences off" 30 GB of space for where the data will eventually go. Then, if one properly stops the torrent before downloading all the material, and the folder goes away, the "fencing" is removed, and the space previously reserved for the non-downloaded material is freed back up to the OS.
This topic also got me curious about the backup drives I use to store older material that I've downloaded, as well as some personal and business stuff. It seems that when I manually copy folders to those off-board drives, there's no wasted space. I tested one with "Disk Properties" and got the following:
389f7525-32fb-49ef-b510-e667f304b6ba-image.png
It looks like there's only 0.1% of overhead here, which is certainly tolerable and not something I'm going to worry about.