Bad take. Everything has a use case. SMR is great as a cold storage medium

One of my coworkers always tells people "Just start with a Plex/media server" and it grows from there. It's worked for at least four of us who work on our team and I'd say we're all doing some cool things now. Good luck friend! Keep labbing

Yes every host should only be exposing what it needs to be exposing. UFW is dirt simple too. The amount of protection you gain for the effort is huge