Agreed, was more so referring to others. I apologize if it seemed like I was referring to myself

I'm already well and truly deep into this, myself. Two Proxmox nodes running the *Arr stack and Jellyfin in LXC containers. Bare metal TrueNAS, with scheduled LTO backups every two weeks. A few other bits and bobs, like some game servers and home automation for family.

Will need to re-map everything eventually, it's kind of grown out of hand

Oh absolutely, difference being that you only need to expose the service once, versus helping however many people set up VPNs to access the service on your LAN

I know way too many people who won't remember to toggle it on, or just won't deal with it

It's just not convenient enough

Unfortunately, not everyone is tech-literate enough nowadays to understand how a VPN works, nor do they want to