I just run an SSH server and forward local ports through that as needed. Simple (at least to me).

I do that as well, along with using sshd as a SOCKS proxy for web based stuff via Firefox, but it can be a bit of a pain to forward each service to each host individually if you have more than a few things going on - especially if you have things trying to use the same port and need to keep track of how you mapped it locally. It can also a lot harder to manage on mobile devices, e.g. say you have some media or home automation services - they won't be as easy to access via a single public SSH host via port forwarding (if at all) as a VPN would be, and wireguard is about as easy a personal VPN as there is.

That's where wg/Tailscale come in - it's just a traditional IP network at that point. Also less to do to shut up bad login attempts from spam bots and such. I once forgot to configure the log settings on sshd and ended up with GBs of logs in a week.

The other big upside (outside of not having a 3rd party) in putting in the slightly more effort to do wg/ssh/other personal VPN is the latency+bandwidth to your home services will be better.

Also to Simon: I am not sure about how Iphone works but in android, you could probably use mosh and termux to then connect to the server as well and have the end result while not relying on third party (in this case tailscale)

I am sure there must be an Iphone app which could probably allow something like this too. I highly recommend more people take a look into such workflow, I might look into it more myself.

Tmate is a wonderful service if you have home networks behind nat's.

I personally like using the hosted instance of tmate (tmate.io) itself but It can be self hosted and is open source

Once again it has third party issue but luckily it can be self hosted so you can even have a mini vps on hetzner/upcloud/ovh and route traffic through that by hosting tmate there so ymmv