I don’t disagree, and I am one of the VPN advocates you mention. Generally there is no issue with exposing jellyfin via proxy to the internet.

The original question seemed to imply an over-secure solution so a lot of over-secure solutions exist. There is good cause to operate services, like jellyfin, via some permanent VPN.

I would not publicly expose ssh. Your home IP will get scanned all the time and external machines will try to connect to your ssh port.

Over the top for security would be to setup a personal VPN and only watch it over the VPN. If you are enabling other users and you don’t want them on your network; using a proxy like nginx is the way.

Being new to this I would look into how to set these things up in docker using docker-compose.

If you wanted to go overboard, don’t even make the server accessible publicly. Distribute keys to a Wireguard network that is accessible publicly. Mandate your players obtain keys from you to play.

Veracrypt. Make a file on your disk.

Don’t want a storage file?

Make 2 partitions, put veracrypt portable exe on the first normal storage partition. (fat32 is likely ideal here) Second partition formatted with veracrypt.

Factory games. Resource management… I get all caught up rebalancing inputs and outputs… This building needs an expansion to fit the new gears project… Over here we need more room for screws… Plates??? Why are all the plates gone!!! 🤬

I transcode to ramdisk.