I tend to go with Panasonic because they make excellent panels. Mine doesnt have ads anywhere in the UI & doesnt have a camera or mic. Our set was originally released in 2021 & still looks great. The menus aren’t great but once its set up we never use them, its turned on/off & thats it. Never connect it to the net. Ours is connected to HTPC & amp
An alternative would be to get a monitor & connect USB TV tuner to your media PC/HTPC
I consider myself a novice but this is how I do it too (ngnx reverse proxy handling SSL in conjunction with Duckdns domain. Wireguard for remote access to everything else). Both Nginx & duckdns are fairly straightforward to set up through Docker/Portainer.
Should the need arise I’ll look at Tailscale.
I dont use HA yet, it’s something I’d like to get into if I can figure out VLAN in order to keep IoT stuff away from the rest of the network.