Having figured it out myself, I agree. And it's not obvious that you need both a Usenet _indexer_ (who tells you what content is available) and a Usenet provider (who actually serves you the content).
FWIW, and I'm not sure if this is against terms here, but I use newsgeek for the former and giganews for the latter. Both are paid services but reasonably priced imo. When I can find something on Usenet, it typically downloads with speeds > 10MBps vs. torrenting which can exceed that but is usually much slower.
You can use whatever client you want. I have the *arr stack mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well and SABnzbd is the recommended option there.
Between you and your provider the downloads are over HTTP. The distribution of content between the Usenet providers is over the Usenet protocol which predates HTTP and the WWW.
