You are using it wrong. You don't care about linear independence, because there are linearly independent vectors which are not orthogonal. So it's not enough to use that.
Instead we can use the orthogonality directly, recall that $\|u\|^2=\langle u,u\rangle$, and now we have:
$$\langle v+w,v+w\rangle = \langle v,v\rangle+\langle v,w\rangle+\langle w,v\rangle+\langle w,w\rangle$$
The assumption of orthogonality means that $\langle v,w\rangle =0$, and the conclusions follow.
For the theorem:
Hint: let $v_{1}, v_{2}, \ldots, v_{k}$ be the vectors in $S$, and suppose there are $c_{1}, \ldots, c_{k}$ such that $v_{1}c_{1} + \cdots + v_{k}c_{k} = 0$. Then take the inner product of both sides with any vector in the set $v_{j}, 1 \leq j \leq k$. Conclude something about the coefficient $c_{j}$ using the fact that $v_{j} \neq 0$ for all vectors $v_{j}$ in the set.
For your next question, orthogonal set implies linearly independent set with the condition that all the vectors in the set are nonzero - we need this in the above proof! (I'll address that in your true false questions).
You're right that linearly independent need not imply orthogonal. To see this, see if you can come up with two vectors which are linearly independent over $\mathbb{R}^{2}$ but have nonzero dot product. (It shouldn't be too hard to do so!)
For your true false question, every orthogonal set need not be linearly independent, as orthogonal sets can certainly include the '$0$' vector, and any set which contains
the '$0$' vector is necessarily linearly dependent.
However, every orthonormal set is linearly independent by the above theorem, as every orthonormal set is an orthogonal set consisting of nonzero vectors.
Best Answer
Suppose $\alpha\textbf{u} + \beta\textbf{v} = \textbf{0}$. Then
$$ 0 = \langle \textbf{v}, \textbf{0}\rangle = \langle \textbf{v}, \alpha\textbf{u} + \beta\textbf{v} \rangle = \alpha \langle \textbf{v}, \textbf{u}\rangle + \beta\langle\textbf{v}, \textbf{v}\rangle = 0 + \beta|\textbf{v}|^2. $$
You can conclude from here that $\beta = 0$ (why?). A similar calculation shows that $\alpha = 0$, from which you can conclude that $\textbf{u}$ and $\textbf{v}$ are linearly independent