A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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In that case, wireguard. I only occasionally need to access a service that's not exposed to the internet, so I use ssh -L, but that would be quite inconvenient for your own use case.
I know tailscale exists but I've never used it, only tried wireguard on its own. Maybe there's some huge benefit to using it but wireguard worked fine for me.
There's no magic bullet here. If you want good defense against bots you should use fail2ban and/or crowdsec. Geoblocking is also worth looking into. You will always have to open a port if you are selfhosting a VPN and will need to take aforementioned steps (or alternatives) to secure it. I believe Tailscale is a very good alternative for people who don't have time to do this as it does not (to the best of my knowledge) require you to expose a port.
I use Netbird (open source networking software from a German company) as it integrates well with Authentik and allows me to use the same SSO for VPN and most of my other services. Setting it up with Authentik and Nginx is a bit complicated but very well documented in my opinion. I do not have a positive experience of the official Android client but Jetbird is a nice alternative. Setting up DNS servers and network routes through peers is quite easy. Enrollment is also a breeze due to the Authentik integration.
Netbird is very nice and easy to use. Only downside is that the iOS app drains battery like crazy :(
I run pfsense as my router on a small form factor PC with two Ethernet cards. I run Wireguard which is pretty easy to setup in pfsense. I have the client installed on my PC at work and my mobile devices. I'm never more than a click from being connected to my home network.
In the past I used ssh tunnels with port forwards to the services I wanted to access remotely.
I use OpenVPN. It’s pretty easy. You set it up with docker, download the client.ovpn file, then turn off port 80 (only needed for downloading that file). Now you can take that file and use it all of your devices to connect.
I do have both (VPN and Reverse Proxy) running. For VPN my router uses Wireguard and at work we use Wireguard as well. You can alter the config in such a way, that only internal traffic would get routed through your VPN. I love this, because for regular traffic, I'm not bound to the upload at my home network or with work, route my personal traffic through the company internet or lose access to my own network.
Reverse proxy isn't bad either. I have a DNS running at home, that redirects my domain used for home stuff, directly to the reverse proxy. This way I can block certain stuff, I want a fancy domain but not be accessed from the outside, because its not needed or not set up properly.
With a VPN, you would be more secure, because its a single instance you need to keep safe. With regular updates and set up properly, this shouldn't be an issue. But I would suggest reading tech news portals, that do cover security breaches of well known software.
With a reverse proxy setup I use, I must trust so many things. I must trust my reverse proxy with the firewall and then each server I run.
But keep one thing in mind. If you for example use stuff like Home Assistant, that you access in the background, it wouldn't work if you connect via a VPN. With Wireguard I can be connected 24/7 to my VPN, even at home. With the previous VPN my router used (I guess it was OpenVPN), this wasn't possible.
My Asus router has a a few nice ones