What my setup will soon be for hardware: Gen 2 AMD epic 16 core CPU Supermicro motherboard with lots of pcie slots 128g ram Intel arc a40 GPU HBA card attached to a super micro disk shelf

Software: Proxmox for host is Truenas Scale (just NAS) in VM with HBA card passed into VM Plex in VM with Intel GPU passed in 3 VMs for docker swarm

Other thoughts: Cloud flare will only be helpful for things you want exposed to the internet. If you do that make sure you have a reverse proxy. This is how I expose services for non-tech family.

VPN will be more secure, but can also be more of a pain. I generally only do that for things only I need or only techy savvy people will use.