Don’t know myself as I have no use case for that setup, but it is a well known setup since several years. If teh performance was bad it wouldn’t be recommended as an alternative as often.

JBOD via mergerfs and snapraid on top for parity is a possible solution.

Take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/indexers/ for starters

That’s the thing, you’d have to connect to the seedbox via VPN anyways.

I’m using usenet anyway, always have, always will ;⁠-⁠)

Is there a way to get and pay seedboxes anonymously? Otherwise the feds could “just” get your information from them. Like with every VPN service you got to trust the the service and their confidentiality (not keeping logs etc) I guess?