Just note i doubt Tailscale were first popular vpn manager as i remember many hobby users are Zerotier converts and also much older products like Hamachi.

Tailscale have build great product around wireguard (which is quite young) and they have great marketing and docs. But they are hardly first VPN service - they might not even be the most popular one.

Yes, I ambiguously said "started this space"... and to be honest even in the most generous interpretation that's probably incorrect, maybe ZeroTier started "this space", in that it had NAT busting mesh networking first.

As far as I understand Tailscale brought NAT busting mesh networking to wireguard + identity first access control, and reduced configuration complexity. I think they were the first to think about it from an end to end user perspective, and each feature they add definitely has this spin on it. It makes it feel effortless and transparent (in both the networking use sense and cryptography sense)... So i suppose that's what I mean by started, TS was when it first really clicked for a larger group of people, it felt right.

Might be time to learn me some Wireguard.