The context of this entire discussion is connecting to internal services; the kind you wouldn’t have in your DMZ, as that has no privileged access to your network.

Anyhoo, you do you, but I certainly wouldn’t make public a reverse proxy with access to my internals.

I think you might be drastically misunderstanding what a reverse proxy does.

Reverse proxy: Gives EVERY computer a direct connection to your network if you make it public, which it certainly sounds like you mean.

VPN: gives only you access to your internals.

In terms of connecting from work and not allowing some untrusted computer, there’s a hundred different options, even running portable QEMU from a USB and using that trusted virtual machine to connect.

I use Bazzite and have a Mac, and I despise every second I have to use MacOS. It is unintuitive and painful in comparison. IMO