This is the correct answer
Penta
You can use curl itself, just set a SOCKS5 proxy with --socks5. Simply point it to the address of a running tor instance. So on arch linux for example, install the tor package, start the systemd service and use localhost:9050 as the proxy.
You are defining the geofilter, but not using it. Try doing "reverse_proxy @mygeofilter mydude:8096"
Check out distrobox. Basically podman or docker containers, but automatically more integrated into the host system. GUI programs work pretty much out of the box with it.
Headscale is pretty light on resources, especially since it doesn't come with a webui (there is third-party ones like headplane you can use though). RAM usage is like 70mb for me currently.
If you want to have more control about it and become independent of the SaaS offering, you can even selfhost headscale, a FOSS tailscale control server. I run it myself with zero issues.
Maybe Tailscale could be super useful for this!
ligma balls