Put OpenWRT on the thing and you'll be able to do what you want. Experience the joy of adding not port forwarding rules for IPv4 but more or less identical (same ports) access rules for IPv6.

> But my TP-Link router blocks by default inbound IPv6 connections

I selfhost web and email over my Wireguard VPN using a free VPS (at OCI but I did it with AWS Lightsail too, though it wasn't free but cheap). This can work for you too or you can use easier to configure solutions like Tailscale. This way, your home isn't exposed directly to the Internet.

Not that it really matters because almost all the consumer roiter manufacturers are pretty bad, but TP-Link is really, really bad. I would highly recommend not using any of their hardware.

All these systems are a reflection of the time that they were designed. IPv6 is 30 years old. At that time a lot of threats just didn't exist. One of my favorite is the decision to default to /64 blocks. There was a time when the designers believed that you'd use your 48 bit MAC address as part of this. Now we know that's a PII nightmare and nobody does it. Yet we're still stuck with the 128 bit addresses that came from that.

To your point, IPv6 sought to replace NAT with just having enough addresses but interestingly, that created a problem. If you used NAT and had a service on your computer request a port for incoming connections, that showed intent on behalf of the owner of that service. IPv6 doesn't have that intent, which forces home router makers do block addresses by default because you don't want most PCs on the Internet such that an external agent can scan your PC. You may end up with an unintended service on the open Internet.

So is the bigger address range better? Technically, maybe? But you have to consider defaults and intents of users. And that can take a good technical solution to a bad solution or at least create a whole bunch of problems.