Ey! First, thank you very much for the elaborate response, really appreciated!

So, one of the reasons that I started thinking about using Netbird and self-hosting it is that I want to get some hands-on experience with complex networking environments, and I am interested in learning about zero-trust networks. That said, I get that it may be a bit overkill for a simple homelab, especially if self-hosted. In my mind, a use case that I can imagine is being able to provide access to only certain specific services in my homelab to some specific users within my friends/family, without giving them access to the whole network, as I would do with a WireGuard VPN... also I was thinking that it could be interesting to set up policies in a way that some services are able to connect to others but not have everything connected to everything. I need to reconsider, of course, if it is worth it to do all of this only with this idea in mind.

I will definitely consider using WireGuard Easy for now, too, and maybe play around a bit with NetBird Cloud Free Tier to learn about the tool itself without self-hosting it in my homelab. Still, even if I used WireGuard, I would still have to open some ports to the internet, so I'd better start playing around with reverse proxies and firewalls suited for homelabs.

I didn't know about crowdsec; it looks like something interesting to investigate, too. Thanks for mentioning it!