I’m curious what issues you had with TrueNAS? I’ve been using it for about a year now and the only issue I have had has been with one of my pools deleting itself after a reboot, but that was user error because I put the wrong SED password in the settings.
I’ve been using Tailscale for about 2 months now. It has a VPN-on-demand setting that I keep enabled. That way, anytime I am not on my local WiFi, it automatically connects the VPN. According to my battery health settings, Tailscale has used 5% of my battery in the last 10 days. And I am even using a Mullvad exit node, which would use even more battery.