You say it. A few years ago my homeserver behalved odd and i needed reboots. I took out the SSD, used dd-rescue and after that The SSD did not even show up as storage any more. Yhea. I also have backups since then. :)
VPN may be used as an artificial bottleneck. In large LAN-architecture with many services running you minimize the attack area when potential threat-actors first have to get access via VPN.