Does Caddy or Traefik get me anything I don't already have?
Currently, I use dockerproxy + swag and Cloudflare for externally-facing services. I really like that I don't have to open any ports on my router for this to work, and I don't need to create any routes for new services. When a new service is started, I simply include a label to call swag and the subdomain & TLS cert are registered with Cloudflare. About the only complaint I have is Cloudflare's 100MG upload limit, but I can easily work around that, and it's not a limit I see myself hitting too often.
What's not clear to me is what I'm missing by not using Traefik or Caddy. Currently, the only thing I don't have in my setup is central authentication. I'm leaning towards Authentik for that, and I might look at putting it on a VPS, but that's the only thing I have planned. Other than that, almost everything's running on a single Beelink S12. If I had to, I could probably stand up a failover pretty quickly, though.
Well, not using Cloudflare would make us all rely a bit less on a single company that already dominates the internet. And it'd make them unable to theoretically mess with your traffic and snoop on your data. Other than that... I don't think you're missing out on features.
I really don't know what to recommend to other people. I use opennic.org for DNS. And I don't use any tunnels, I just do port forwarding on my router. I have an internet connection that allows that.
If you use caddy it works like a charm out of the box with their desec module. If you run caddy with via docker compose you can integrate the respective module pretty easily, check the ”Adding custom Caddy modules" section on their docker hub page.
1984.hosting has a freely available to use DNS service for domains. They're a good company that does what Njalla say they do but without the bullshit of stealing peoples domains.
No, Njalla is. They have a history of stealing domains and banning users without explaining why and absolutely refuse to look into why a user got banned in the first place. On top of that generally terrible customer support.
I've had the complete opposite experience with 1984.hosting, support has been great and they even support GPG keys to one of their emails if you want to keep your inquires encrypted.