How do I increase my peer count? I checked both tutorials (.guide and .space) and neither mentions it. For now I've externally forwarded port 8336 to my node but I'm still showing 15 peers. I'm not even sure if 8336 is needed at all (I believe 8337 is used for local gRPC calls)

Might I first suggest you get some rizz? 

But honestly my node hovers around the same and it works just fine.

W̴̢̛͈̘͇̃̾̐̚͝ͅė̴̱b̴͖̱͗̓͗3̸͖͙̫͙̾̂̊ ̸̥͍̙͉̙̉̀̕͝͝͝D̵͇͖̲͆͊̋͝è̷̺̓v̷͙̟͖̥͔̆, 🟪#153

yes, I would assume. Not sure on how the connections actually work because technically its possible for you to "leech" by just running nodes that connect one way and never gossip beyond that bootstrap set I think. Hard to say without digging in, cc @cassie

But surely the P2P requires open ports to work optimally, that's how P2P has worked since P2P is a thing. I'm surprised it's not documented anywhere as far as I can tell