definitely don't expose any management interfaces to the open internet.
personally, i manage my homelab through ssh via the commandline, and key-based ssh auth is secure enough for my threat model (i am considering switching the entrypoint machine to a BSD though, to avoid the kind of bugs distros sometimes introduce).
but a webserver and a few containerized services seem pretty low risk to me, so i do have a few of them exposed via reverse proxy. The more sensitive one behind Authelia via the forward-auth pattern, which i feel like is a really good fit for homelabs.
i'm pretty sure Mox (email server with included webui written in Go) does that - at least the Umlauts in mails i get from Hetzner seem to always stand out.
it also defaults to not loading HTML in emails, which i love. really opened my eyes to how dumb it really is to just accept all kinds of dynamic content in unknown messages. (kinda same as how the modern web relies on remote code execution to work)
quickly skimming the article i couldn't see a specific price for the ipv4 block, but ipv6 is cheap - the article mentions having to pay at least $50 a year + service fees to a "LIR", and you also need a BGP-enabled hosting provider which i imagine will come with similar cost at least (don't quote me on that).
this was my plan, but then i got really into using LSPs and i'm not about to install every LSP on every server i ssh into.
Currently i just use sshfs to mount whatever directory i want to work on locally, nice to have all lsps available and also see my changes reflected on the server instantly.
if you actually care about bloat, by far the best* thing to do is set up arch linux manually (no archinstall script) and just install the packages you actually need. it's insane how little it actually takes to get a working system.
it's a bunch of effort though, both to learn how everything works and to set up all the things you're usually just used to being there by default. but once it's done you'll be able to fix any issue that pops up, because you actually KNOW what's on your system, as opposed to it being a massive collection of things you have no idea about.
*something like gentoo might be better but... compiling a browser takes ages and i recommend having an up to date browser, so you'll spend tons of time on that.
it's going pretty well right now, but if they keep massively increasing prices, it won't keep up forever.
the company i work at pays almost double now compared to a year ago, for arguably worse service. some of us in IT are looking at options, because being locked into a service that keeps shooting up in price is a huge risk.
yes it'll be hard to get away from the ecosystem. but with the increasing price, demand for alternatives surges too, and i can't see it taking too long until we get some options.
it was a couple years ago, but when i tried to game on Debian i was shocked by some 4+ year old packages that i wanted to try gaming with, nothing worked.
it's probably better today, but i definitely recommend a very up to date distro for gaming, and arch is literally the most up to date there is. happy with arch myself, except the nvidia issues, if you run an nvidia gpu i don't recommend it just yet (getting better really quickly though)
as an office worker... i use linux, a bunch in my team use apple's OS. i'd say it's only about half of my team that still uses windows, trending downwards. but in general i'd probably agree that more than 72% of office workers use windows, just definitely not all of them and i'd expect it to keep trending downwards if m$ doesn't change course.