To access my stuff at home and elsewhere from anywhere I use Twingate. I don’t expose anything from my home via Cloudflare. I do use cloudflare WAFs for stuff on my VPSs.

Sadly there is no real alternative right now if you want anything close to what the cloud providers do. Synthing is the only thing I use that comes close to parts of it. Nextcloud is just a slow insecure mess.

It is great but ZT solutions like twingate is just so much easier and faster.

Go Unraid. Great starting point for that kind of setup.

Make sure upnp is not enabled on your modem/router. Scan your public IP from the outside, or use shields up to see if anything is exposed.