I am no expert but I learned enough to set it up with my *arr stack and it’s my primary ship for sailing the seas. My use case is English language popular content. So YMMV.
Search for the Usenet backbone map or usenet provider map. You will see that there are only a handful of companies providing different “backbones”. Content may be different on different backbones and the copyright takedown notices may be different (DMCA or NTD).
I pay for an unlimited subscription from a provider on one backbone and purchased a couple of 500gb blocks (on sale) on another backbone. (A block is a one-time fee that allows me to download a specified amount of data, from a provider, and they don’t expire).
My understanding is that content on Usenet is broken into multiple parts and the file names are obfuscated, making it more difficult to take down. If they are taken down, it might only be a few parts. Your download client can be configured to download the missing parts from multiple servers (in my case the blocks).
I don’t recall finding something in my indexers that wouldn’t download because of takedowns.
My recommendation would be to try it with blocks or the cheap €2 providers to see if you are happy. If you struggle to find content branch out.
I don’t use VPN with Usenet. I don’t want to bottleneck those sweet 500/600 Mbps download speeds. Never had an issue. Edit: because I setup the SSL servers)
Oh yeah like that one that does a percentage discount based on the daily high temperature in their home city.