I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.

How about Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust? The caveat being that you have to own a domain that you can change the nameservers to the ones Cloudflare assigns you. You can purchase a domain from Cloudflare, but I think a lot of people get one from NamesCheap or PorkBun. I purchased on for less than $5 USD. With Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust, you don’t have to open ports, fiddle with NAT, or any of that. You install it on your server and it punches a hole in to allow communication.

Some people like Cloudflare, some people don’t. Personally, I’ve never had any issues except for a very brief downtime a while back.