I'll have to disagree with you there. SSH is super well maintained and understood, and massively useful for the risk you do run. Who knows what's going on with all the random projects people are hosting. I'd rather have SSH exposed than almost anything else.

What would you do to provide access to some less tech savvy friends. I'm thinking of dropping a SBC with wireguard and a proxy onto a friend's network, that way everything is under my control, and I can lock down the wireguard connection however I want, but I haven't gone down that route yet.