>it never felt like something you’d recommend to a normal person.
Thanks for the recommendation, and the compliment ;)
Well, I'm no expert and way out-of-date but I just looked at today's "VPN routers" and on first glance they don't look like quite the same animal. It's been about 30 years after all.
These modern versions look like they are for millions of people who have censorship problems on their home ISP, so they are intended so any traffic from their local network gets encrypted before exposure to their ISP, and everything that reaches the internet is all through a paid external relay service like NordVPN. Also to the rest of the world your actual home/office IP address and location are not revealed, a provider like Nord uses its own selected address and location as a substitute to interface you to the world instead.
Kind of like a solitary laptop user would install NordVPN on the laptop then have the same encryption/protection and substitute address/location. And actually appear to the world to always be coming from that same substitute Nord location regardless of what hotel room you are in when you fire up the laptop.
The antique VPN routers were more like office machines where censorship was not the issue, but still concerned with confidentiality and security. Mainly you just wanted authorized remote PC's to autologin to the home office and act like you were back there in the office. The home/office public IP address was not concealed from the internet, and "normal" traffic from the local office network through the router to the ISP was not encrypted. When the VPN function in the router was enabled, it then laid in wait for you to log in remotely from your preconfigured authorized laptop(s), and all traffic between the router and the remote PC is encrypted through its own private tunnel. Remotely like this it's like being right there in the office so you have access to the same local resources, and you can be actually accessing the general internet through the home office router using the ISP and services you are already paying for. With no other restrictions or additional payments needed. And the remote hotel ISP sees nothing but encrypted traffic this way too.
Maybe the modern VPN routers are actually capable of doing the same old thing but it's not nearly as popular as paid services any more?
If so, maybe it would be worthwhile to have a turnkey routine like a dashboard that's foolproof to configure a remote device, so it properly interfaces with the modern type home/office router over the internet, IPv4 and/or IPV6. The hard part is that this may still depend on manually configuring the VPN router to act like the old kind as much as possible, since you need your router to act as as the VPN server in place of a Nord server for instance. Rather than act like a commercial-VPN client that these newer routers seem to default to (and might only be capable of?).
Otherwise you would need more than just the dashboard app for the remote PCs.
You've got to have a local solution for the home location too.
Alternatively there are Wireguard-capable routers that can be made to behave the old way. Setting them up could still be the hard part and could require some tech effort, but you only need to do it once. And once that's accomplished according to some reliable guidelines, then it should be a quick and simple breeze to authorize a remote device having Wireguard installed, when needed by manual entry of approved credentials beforehand (or on the spot), without need for Tailscale.
If everything fell into place, the same bone-simple dashboard app would work to reach various VPN server scenarios.