One reason is that if you ever have an issue with RealDebrid, you can expect them to post your name and email publicly online while talking a boat load of shit about you.
Why would you sign up for a piracy service with your government name and email address? RealDebrid thinks my name is Bizzle McLastname and my email address is [email protected]
Still, bad business like that is definitely a compelling reason to switch regardless
Those are dependent on the relevant torrent being available and seeded
Jellyfin/Plex and Radarr/Sonarr + Usenet, you'll have said file once downloaded for as long as you want, but requires considerably more storage space and torrents suck for older, more obscure stuff. Usenet doesn't depend on seeders, and the big boys have something like 15+ years retention and you'll always download them at full speed (no tons of seeders but slow upload speeds to worry about either)
Yes most people use HDDs for this because their speed doesn't matter when they're just serving up a single (or even a dozen) huge files at playback speeds. They're slow for hosting your OS because of the quantity and speed of reads and writes but this isn't an issue with movies, TV, or music.
I store my entire Plex library on an old Dell t420 server which has an old spinning disk raid array and it performs well enough. And if you're able to direct play the files they you don't even need a strong CPU when hosting Plex, you can run it on a raspberry pi.
I use same solution as you having tried emby and sonarr etc. the biggest problem got my family and me was searching what to watch and adding it rrr services, we wanted to have netflix but quite instant, not just to watch ( as you might have to wait a while be at 5 or 10 mins on torrent) but also browse, there is so much to watch what should I download, so streamio helped me there, now how to get there media, well debrid services gave us instant access, so it was quite a easy solution.
Biggest upside of Plex for me is the fact that you can set up secure streaming from anywhere with basically a single click. With Jellyfin, that is much more manual.
Besides that, I think some people may like that Plex has its own set of TV Shows & movies to stream, though I'm certain that those are ad supported. (Haven't used that feature & have moved to Jellyfin)
i dont have a desktop or a server that can run this stuff constantly yet. but is usenet still good for the "discussions?" i thought there were better free versions.
If you have the time to seed a lot then private torrent trackers can be just as effective for finding your ahem... linux ISOs without the cost. Usenet is most useful for people who are worried about repercussions from their gov for seeding (as many count this as "distribution" and it carries more weight than simply downloading)
I would be torrenting with a VPN with multihop, and seeding is a bit iffy in my country becuase you cannot be charged here for downloading, but you can be charged with seeding.
Usenet is a bit more work to setup than bittorrent, but you will be able to find lots of movies and TV shows there without having to seed anything. Unfortunately, you have to pay for access to good indexers if you want to download more than a few files per day.
As far as I know, there's still a strong but small community on Usenet for discussions still
As far as server/desktop stuffs, many have had decent success running them on things like old laptops and raspberry pis to decent success. Won't be as powerful, but if it's just you and a spouse and maybe kids or something it should be just fine