I've been doing this for many years, and I don't know why it's not more common. The most common thing I hear when I explain to people, though, is they don't see the point if the VPN isn't shielding your traffic from your home's ISP.

I think that just speaks to people thinking that's the only use case for a VPN, probably because of all the marketing from VPN service providers.

I originally set it up in order to be able to funnel all of my smartphone traffic through my home network so my firewall rules apply to my phone as well. Since then, though, I've discovered numerous other advantages.

Wanna party like it's 1999?

Back when most entry-level Linksys routers were regular ordinary VPN routers?

And they included built-in DynDNS functionality right in the router configuration routine if you wanted to use that too. In case you had a registered domain that you wanted to use for consistent remote access in the face of numerical IP addresses that were subject to change dynamically by your ISP.

Plus of course DynDNS was free as originally intended with no end in sight.

The main obstacle was configuring your remote Windows 98 laptop to make use of the VPN that the router handled on its own. About like configuring bare Wireguard before there was Tailscale.

Eventually Cisco bought Linksys and it was all downhill from there.