Here's a way to limit the IO usage of a process (or process group).
What did not really make a difference is using ionice
to change the priority. In this case,
the reason might be, that the background job is a highly concurrent rclone
job and it might
still dominate the IO queues by the sheer amount of concurrent IO scheduled.
What does work, is using cgroups to limit the total IO bandwidth for a group.
Create a group: