A reverse proxy still needs “forwarded ports in some capacity”

Nitpicking and very specific case - but it is not necessarily true if you use a VPS to host the reverse proxy. I have a wireguard tunnel in pfsense where I configure my VPS as a peer and all communication between VPS and home happens over that tunnel. Doesn’t require me to open any ports in my home. This also lets me have two layers of access control - through allowed ip in wireguard config and through interface firewall rules in pfsense.

This really does prove the point once again:

Mice are actually vast, hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings. They are not only subtly guiding our behavior by participating in our behavioral experiments, but also using us for scientific breakthroughs to improve their own quality of life.