Good idea to start with k3d https://k3d.io/stable/

As the other commenter said, k3d is definitely the way to go in 2025. It uses k3s under the covers which you can actually use in production after you learn with k3d locally.

I've been operating home cluster (on-prem and lately hybrid with cloud instances) for several years now, running a lot of self-hosted applications for my family.

To be frank I struggle to understand what kubevpn does. While I may be missing something important, the quality of the documentation and description is lacking. Documentation is key as you are learning, so I suggest you don't use it and just focus on deploying and using k8s to host something.

IMO, k3s is the best distribution for hobbyists, by far. If you want to add connectivity to it - k3s supports tailscale now and I can confirm that it is quite stable.