I'm living the "dream" right now... my buffer expired sometime back in March-ish and I just haven't had one since Granted I kind of did it to myself...
I used up most of it in December when I took time off to do other stuff, but for some reason when I got back to it mid-january I decided "hey I've been drawing like 2-3 pages a week and uploading just 1... maybe I should start uploading 2-3 pages instead and my current buffer will maintain itself, right??"
Nope, absolutely not LOL so I just ate it all in a few weeks and was like "crap".
Uhhh at that point, if I were working on a longer project I probably would have tried to get to the end of the chapter or whatever and took some time off to rebuild. As-is this season is coming to an end shortly and was originally planned as a standalone one-shot anyways so... I decided to just tough it out and draw my 1 page a week every single week to upload xD
I think my biggest takeaway though is that I'm really not a fan of like... drawing the same content that you're uploading at the moment, if that makes sense? At it's biggest I think my buffer was only like a month and a half or so long. So even when I had one I was still kinda under pressure to keep moving briskly or risk running out... which happened. I think for my next season I'm going to instead draw like all of it up front- or at least most of it- before I start uploading. I want to be able to make it peacefully and not feel rushed all the time