[Question] Why should I not open ports to the internet on my home router? - Lemmy.World

I’m in the process of setting up homelab stuff and i’ve been doing some reading. It seems the consensus is to put everything behind a reverse proxy and use a vpn or cloudflare tunnel. I plan to use a VPN for accessing my internal network from outside and to protect less battle tested foss software. But I feel like if I cant open a port to the internet to host a webserver then the internet is no longer a free place and we’re cooked. So my question is, Can I expose webserver, SSH, WireGuard to the internet with reasonable safety? What precautions and common mistakes do I need to watchout for.