Accidentally wiring everything to everything else sounds kind of scary.
There's 1 or 2 things I wouldn't mind securely exposing to the internet (like Plex) but nothing I need so desperately while I'm out and about that I'd even want to take that risk.
Sounds like this is just for self-hosting?
this has me worried. i would not want that. i use zerotier, not tailscale, but the principle is the same. i have my laptops and my phone connected to my servers. given that all of those machines are already on the internet, connecting them into a virtual network does not add any risk in my opinion. (at least as long as you don't use features like the above). all i get is a known ip address for all my devices, with the ability to connect to them if they have an ssh server running. when i am outside the primary benefit is that i can tell which devices are online.
Well, yes and no.
You can use it like ngrok, and I'm sure you could configure wireguard and ngrok to give you something similar to what Tailscale does, but Tailscale does it out of the box, with polished and well built client and server apps.
I'm no infra guy, I'm just a former front-end eng, but it gives me the confidence to expose media centres and file servers etc to "the wild" without it being public.
Using Jellyfin to watch content from my home server on my iPad while I'm away from home is as "easy" as Disney or Netflix with Tailscale, just installed the clients and servers and .. voila?
But personally, I'm past the point of wanting to fiddle with things like this and would much prefer them to just work out of the box.. so I can fiddle with the things I wanted to, and not end up down a (personally) unenjoyable rabbit hole.
No judgment on people who do enjoy it, though! I used to, and maybe I will again at some point.
More importantly you can use it to access your bank or other services which often block non-US IPs. It's saved me a few times in the last year or two.