So for the past few years (?) I have been using wireguard to vpn into (effectively) my firewall and a dynamic dns setup to access that remotely. But with the shitshow that is google domains and the like, this seems like a good opportunity to look into a few of the alternatives. I am not entirely opposed to just going in and changing the dns server once I figure out what I am going to do on that front, but wireguard has always been a bit of a mess to set up for less "tech savvy" people who need access to the home network.
Every so often I see some cloud based solutions get suggested. Which is sketchy but I already have a few alerts set up to be able to remotely shut my network down if wireguard is acting up when it shouldn't be and shutting down a VM is a lot less of a "do I really need to do this?" than shutting off the entire network. But most of those solutions seem built around selling seats which means they want you to add individual devices rather than just setting up a tunnel.
So is wireguard still the gold standard? Or is there a more user friendly solution that will let me compromise a bit but also have a setup that doesn't require me to be physically on site to fix the inevitable hiccups because it takes hours of reading articles to understand the setup?
I think that is the seat based one I see recommended all the time.
I understand that hub and spoke models are inherently questionable security wise and switching to a mesh based approach is probably the answer. But it tends to make for a mess of needing to make sure my various "homelab" servers are aware and so forth.
Might want to check ZeroTier too. They don't have as much features as Tailscale, but have more relaxed limit. If you can't decide, you can use both Tailscale and ZeroTier at the same time without issue.
You won't realise the full value of Tailscale's features this way though - for example, you'll miss out on the ability to share an individual device with someone else, the ability to configure ACLs between particular devices (e.g. allow someone access to just a particular port on a server, while allowing yourself full access), and Tailscale SSH.