Background: 15 years of experience in software and apparently spoiled because it was already set up correctly.
Been practicing doing my own servers, published a test site and 24 hours later, root was compromised.
Rolled back to the backup before I made it public and now I have a security checklist.
Lol ssh has no reason to be port exposed in 99% of home server setups.
VPNs are extremely easy, free, and wireguard is very performant with openvpn also fine for ssh. I have yet to see any usecase for simply port forwarding ssh in a home setup. Even a public git server can be tunneled through https.