After trying out Cosmos Cloud (and it not working for the clients), I’m back at square one again. I was going to install Docker Desktop, but I see it warns that it runs on a VM. Will this be a problem when trying to remote connect to certain services, like Mealie or Jellyfin?
https://training.linuxfoundation.org/networking/
It seems they don’t have anything on networking exactly, but maybe some of their stuff on container orchestration can be helpful https://training.linuxfoundation.org/full-catalog/?_sft_product_type=training&_sft_topic_area=cloud-containers
About the domains and reverse proxies, if you are testing or on local network reverse proxy or domain are not needed. If you want to access it outside of your network they make more sense.
But also for my services I use https://tailscale.com/ and that way I avoid dealing with domain and reverse proxies by instead just connecting to my local network remotely.