due to some technical considerations I don't like to run a VPN on my media server
What's the reasons against using a VPN here?
Getting into the weeds a bit here lol. I do use a VPN on my personal PC, but on the media server where I have my *arr stack, I've found that using a VPN, even with split tunneling configured, allows certain TV websites to detect I'm using a VPN and block streaming content. If I wasn't using a DNS proxy, or if I ran the stack on a separate server, it probably wouldn't be an issue, but I'm not so it is :p. I'll add that if I am using only Usenet then I prefer not to run a VPN since it's reasonably safe IMO to raw dog that content, since a VPN always has some overhead involved in terms of bandwidth and latency.
Why not just run the torrenting stack behind the VPN in a separate docker container? Then the rest of your media server is completely unaffected by the VPN and no need for any split tunneling.
That's a good suggestion, I just haven't had the motivation to get that setup yet since Usenet currently meets my needs. But I'm sure it would work, yes.
Gluetun works great for this. It's a VPN docker container that you can route other containers' network connections through. Super lightweight and fast
Idk if you tried this, but I run all my stuff on docker and put specific things through gluetun (arrs and qbit).