I’ll admit I’ve only really been doing all of this fun self-hosting stuff for about 4 years now but I have been learning computer since Apple II. With my local fiber internet I have a static IP address and seem to have no barriers to expose my hosted websites to the internet. I’ve never used cloudfare and can’t imagine why I would need it. Use NGINX reverse proxy manager at both home and work. Some people have to jump through all these hoops and I’m just curious to know what situations necessitate all the extra hassle.
Well many ISPs have started to use CGNATs so static IPs have become/will become a rarity. In this case exposing your service to the internet is not so straightforward. But if this is nitpicking, in general, networking, proxying, port forwarding etc., have a steep learning curve. So when people, who are just starting out, hit a wall and post a query here it might seem like they must go through hell before they can achieve what they want.
Also, another thing is security. Even if it’s easy to expose a service to the public internet, given the cyber climate, it’s quite important to go through a few hoops to make sure you do it securely.
Most of the services I access through Open VPN installed on my router but I do have things like vault Warden, next cloud, mesh Central, and a few others exposed directly. They all require username and passwords to get into and I use almost everyday and wouldn’t know how else to use them in my workflow if they weren’t exposed directly to the internet.