Have you set up Tailscale and have you set up OpenVPN from scratch? Because these two things are not alike. That’s why I’m pushing back a bit.

I find it difficult to imagine equating a raspberry pi in a closet with “running a server”. Is it technically a server? Sure. But it’s not as if we’re talking about running a power hungry rack.

Bottom line is: there are very cheap and simple/easy options for maintaining a private connection to your home stuff.

> and figure out all the networking bits that will get it to talk to the printer

With something like Tailscale this is already figured out. My mostly non technical brother does this without issues.

This is entirely separate from whether or not you should need to do so for Bambu printers, which again I agree the answer is ideally “no”.