Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a very large field, and you’re playing in two or three areas here.

Look at a couple of overlay options. ZeroTier is the one I remember off top of my head. There are others, Google alternatives. These use a coordination server. Some are a hosted service, but there’s some that you host yourself. These are supposed to be pretty easy. You watch a couple of videos on these, I bet you’re be fine.

Wire guard offers more traditional VPN. You can tunnel your device back to your network. Some routers offer a VPN option. There’s open sense, ddwrt, etc. Again, lots of videos.

Since you said you mostly wanted remote access, I strongly suggest not opening services to public and use VPN.

You can still learn reverse proxy too, but just do it internally, even though it wouldn’t technically be needed. This will be much safer and learner friendly.

I have ridiculous amounts of services running, but I use gateway router VPN to access most of them.