Fortunately I have enough of the rar parts to extract the data I want but damn.
Whether you pay 7,50 on usenet or a VPN
VPN's don't cost nearly that much. You can find a VPN on this lemmy post. It doesn't matter what you chose no VPN that I've ever seen costs that much money. And many people on private trackers risk going without VPN's because copyright trolls are quite rare on them.
There is a lot of malware
This is true on certain public trackers. But not on private trackers, or trackers verified by fmhy.net.
several download clients are known to use your machine in the background to mine crypto
This is easily avoided by using a popular open source BitTorrent client, the most popular one being qBittorrent.
there’s an open connection to your machine which could be used by hackers as torrent connections aren’t very safe.
I'm not sure this is true, could you possibly provide a source? I had believed torrents are quite secure since the connection is encrypted and it uses hashing to verify what you downloaded matches the .torrent file.
I've always been on the team torrent, although I have never tried Usenet. I can definitely see the appeal of not having to worry about ratio or giving back to the community, but that is part of the appeal to me. Do Usenet groups or indexers have a community surrounding them? Private torrent trackers always have forums to chat about media your watching/reading/listening or talk about quality or other random things. Does Usenet have a similar situation?