Have you considered using a mesh VPN instead of opening a port to the public? Nebula and TailScale are both great options that have a free tier which is more than enough for most home use cases. With Nebula you can even selfhost your discovery node so nothing is cloud-based, but then you’re back to opening firewall ports again.

Anyway, its going to be more secure than even a properly configured reverse proxy setup and way less hassle.

The lack of understanding around open source is alarming. Open Source licenses only require someone to share the source with anyone who gets a copy of the binary. So top secret military software can still be open source because if the DoD doesn’t share the binary, they don’t have to share the code either. But forcing it to be open source ensures that if that software is ever declassified and distributed to 3rd parties, those third parties will have a legal right to the source.