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How do you handle it? The metal obviously loses its shine from matt varnish, and even glossing it up with some gloss after the matt doesn't look the same, it doesn't look like metal anymore really.

I don't have problems with it- I use satin varnish, and generally an NMM style highlight pattern with good strong extreme highlights. You get enough glint like that.

Satin is typically the way to go. If you're doing NMM then it probably doesn't matter as much if you dull it down slightly because you manually painted the reflections in.

But for regular metallics, a matte varnish dulls them down too much and a gloss varnish just makes them look strange as if they're wet or fake.

A satin is best, though not all satins are the same, I think the Vallejo Polyurethane Satin is probably a good varnish for metallics. The regular Vallejo Satin (not polyurethane) was much duller for me and probably not great for metallics.