I've done a bit of both... I used CloudFlare which works fine and then I moved over to tailscale when playing with pxe / netboot and I've not decided on what to use beyond tailscale's magic dns. Unbound looks pretty nice.
The AppleTV is always powered on, but it only uses 0.3 watts while idle.
This isn't true. You can use Tailscale "Subnet Routers" to access devices within a network without the Tailscale software installed. You still need one device to act as SR, but that would be a requirement for leveraging any traditional VPN as well.
Now, I have found it easier to manage devices using Tailscale. Also, Tailscale makes it very easy to manage some very dynamic routing (managing connections to external VPNs that mandate different non-wireguard clients).
Sadly, I’ve hit some issues with using tailscale’s DNS provider (my work configured Mac doesn’t like to have the DNS server changed), so I still have some work to do on that side.
Personally, I wouldn't let incoming traffic hit my home IP/router by itself, that's why I suggested having something in-between public internet and your local network.
But, any way that works obviously works, the rest is just details :)
The VPS solution is usually the hub of a star-shaped network, so everything has to go through it, which may be limiting, given that, at least where I live, gigabit fiber is fairly widespread and reasonably priced. Most VPSs I see have less bandwidth than that.
There's headscale which allows setting up tailscale with a private server: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/
Anything that needs to be exposed to the internet (which was essentially TeslaMate during setup) through a cloudflare tunnel, which terminates on a server behind my router.
I just added their debian repo and apt install'd the two packages (dnsdist and pdns-server). Set the respective config files appropriately (dnsdist is a little hard, but googling got me there) and bam. I've got dnsdist serving DoH, DoT, and plain port53 DNS with some ACLs, was really easy IMO.