I am a happy openHAB user for 5+ years. Have you considered switching to see if you like it?
I actually have considered it, and I'm still thinking about it.
I run stuff locally and can connect over VPN to my home and operate as if I am inside the home. I have not looked into these other cloudflare tunnels or tail scale as I don’t think it would provide any advantage to my current setup.
I have a strange setup. My ISP is Starlink (so I'm behind a CGNAT), meaning I kinda need another service to access them outside the network, but (as mentioned) I mainly host for my family who wouldn't know how to work another app or VPN.
I'm (currently) on Raspberry Pi OS (as I need something that "just works"). Home Assistant is running in Docker like everything else.
I should've mentioned this, but I'm using Nginx (I really enjoy the simplicity of just having to add a section to a file whenever I want to add something). Before running HAOS I was running RPIOS again and used Traefik, it worked (but felt like a lot more work to setup than just a plain Nginx setup).
Edit: I forgot to mention, but there are things like
stripPrefix
for Nginx, I'm going to look into them. Although, this is what I meant, when you start to do things that are "advanced" with Home Assistant they turn into "hacks," and the barrier for advanced things feels a lot lower than with other self-hosted services (and I get that Home Assistant is very complex under the hood, it's just frustrating).