Oh the joys of Linux. The simplest things take the longest and you always end up learning some random ecosystem you never wanted to learn. Eventually you will find some weird set or circumstances that make everything work in which case you will never touch it again. Then 5-10 years from now you will finally realize all the mistakes you made when you no longer care about the problem you are trying to solve.

Just did a fresh install after attempting to migrate from a proxmox VM to baremetal (turns out my mobo only supports UEFI and after spending an hr trying to convert I just gave up and reinstalled)

Also if you do go this route and are concerned about privacy and security you can get a cheap vps then setup a VPN (wireguard probably) on the vps and have your home server connect to that. Then you can forward the vps ports to the VPN IP of your home server. This means that you don’t need to have port forwarding or even a dedicated IP at home and users don’t get your home IP. Keep in mind you need a vps that is relatively close to your house to keep the latency down as this setup will add twice the latency between home and the vps to the connection.

Just an FYI getting a vps or dedicated server that is fast enough for Minecraft modpacks is going to be fairly expensive. It might be cheaper to get shared hosting for the MC server and a separate vps for the docker stuff.