I actually think Tailscale may be an even bigger deal here than sysadmin help from Claude Code at al.
The biggest reason I had not to run a home server was security: I'm worried that I might fall behind on updates and end up compromised.
Tailscale dramatically reduces this risk, because I can so easily configure it so my own devices can talk to my home server from anywhere in the world without the risk of exposing any ports on it directly to the internet.
Being able to hit my home server directly from my iPhone via a tailnet no matter where in the world my iPhone might be is really cool.
I am not sure why people are so afraid of exposing ports. I have dozens of ports open on my server including SMTP, IMAP(S), HTTP(S), various game servers and don't see a problem with that. I can't rule out a vulnerability somewhere but services are containerized and/or run as separate UNIX users. It's the way the Internet is meant to work.
There was a popular post less than a month ago about this recently >>46305585
I agree maintaining wireguard is a good compromise. It may not be "the way the internet was intended to work" but it lets you keep something which feels very close without relying on a 3rd party or exposing everything directly. On top of that, it's really not any more work than Tailscale to maintain.
This incident precisely shows that containerization worked as intended and protected the host.
Containerizing your publicly exposed service will also not protect your HTTP server from hosting malware or your SMTP server from sending SPAM, it only means you've protected your SMTP server from your compromised HTTP server (assuming you've even locked it down accurately, which is exactly the kind of thing people don't want to be worried about).
Tailscale puts the protection of the public portion of the story to a company dedicated to keeping that portion secure. Wireguard (or similar) limit the protection to a single service with low churn and minimal attack surface. It's a very different discussion than preventing lateral movement alone. And that all goes without mentioning not everyone wants to deal with containers in the first place (though many do in either scenario).