I've recently switched to pangolin, which works like cloudflared tunnels, and it's been pretty good.
They offer docker support but they also support installing manually. You install pangolin on your vps via a setup script, and you install newt on a machine inside your homelab. It supports raw udp/tcp in addition to http.

I'd challenge what you said about docker, though. There is very little overhead in making a docker turduckin.
And actually docker is exactly for delivering turnkey applications, not for reproducable dev environment; I imagine that they don't have a default data persistence because not everything needs it and that's less secure by default. LXC (which is what you'll mostly use in proxmox) and VMs seem more for reproducable dev environments, afaict. And there are some really good tools for managing the deployment of docker artifacts, compared to doing it yourself or using LXCs: for example dockge or portainer. I gave proxmox a try, but switched to portainer recently, because managing containers was easier and they still let you define persistent shared volumes like proxmox does.

Proxmox is still good if you need to run VMs, but if all you need is OCI/docker containers, then there are simpler alternatives, in my limited experience.