There's nothing saying you can't have ports forwarded for the NAS, and have a VPN for everything else. Censorship may be a problem, but those more often block VPN services like NordVPN, not protocols. So running your own is less likely to be stopped. That said, of course comply with local laws, I don't know where you live or what's legal there.

If you really want multiple things exposed at the same time, you have two options(which can be used in combination if needed/wanted):

1. A reverse proxy. I use caddy. I give it a config file that says what address and port binds to what hostname, and I forward port 443/80 to it. That works great for web content.
2. Use custom ports for everything. I saw someone else walking you through that. It works, but is a little harder to remember, so good notes will be important.

I still recommend against forwarding a lot of ports as a beginner. It's very common for software and web apps to have security vulnerabilities, and unless you are really on top of it, you could get hit. Not only does that put all your internal devices at risk, not just the one that was original breached, it also will likely become part of a botnet, so your local devices will be used to attack other people. I'd recommend getting confident with your ability to maintain your services and hardening your environment first.

It's definitely not the same thing.
I do understand reservations behind usage free-tier services from Big Bad Corp., but I don't understand malicious reduction of valid arguments for usage of those services.

Update: tried Caddy, love it, dead simple, super fast, and absolutely works!

That's a good piece of advice, but due to several considerations (extreme censorship interrupting VPN connections, family using NAS for automatic backups, and some others) I cannot go that route.

It's not illegal to use VPN in my area, but connections are blocked on a protocol level, both through OpenVPN and Wireguard.

I already managed to make caddy work, so, hooray!

I also found a setting on my router that fully isolates certain devices from the local network. I want to put the server in there, so that the rest of my LAN is not under threat. I also want to figure out VLANs.

What do you mean by blocked at a protocol level? You might give it a try on a random port to see what happens.

You could also look into port knocking. It is dated but still worth while.

I am not an expert on security and I don't know how to setup ddns, but I simply use Tailscale VPN to access my RPi4 homeserver running Umbrel from outside of my home, I simply installed Tailscale in my Umbrel and in my phone, and when I want to access from my phone Immich, Nextcloud or any other app running on my Umbrel. I simply enable the Tailscale VPN. Maybe it has some limitations, but is the simpler way I found, and based on what I read, it is more secure than exposing a port in the router, but not sure.

It literally does the same thing, except it's self hosted?

Why wouldn't you setup a firewall on the VPS?

all home routers have NAT which functions as a firewall, but VPSes don't cone with any firewall by default, so you'd have to set one up. Also VPS ranges seem to hotter for scanning.