What doesn't make sense is your use of the term "offline editor" - it's entirely nonsensical in this context. If they can't use an offline editor, they won't be any better with an online editor. It's like saying you need a 4 door car because you can't drive a 2 door car - it's the same thing with more seats. Photo editing is photo editing regardless of where the software is hosted.
I use Tailscale on PFsense. Just advertise the route to the local subnet and accept routes on whatever machine you're accessing from and you've got yourself a pretty much plug and play solution.
I don't use proton but I found with tailscale it's much more stable to use systemd-resolved because it doesn't overwrite resolv.conf. I don't know if this is the case with proton as I don't know how it treats different resolvers but I would look into it.
Both Wayland and Pipewire have been the direct cause of unusable VMs. Replacing them with Xorg and Pulse makes all the VMs usable again. This has been the case in VMWare, Virtualbox, and Hyper-V. VMs in Proxmox have been less problematic but still problematic.
I'm not saying in anyway that what you're doing is in anyway wrong. It's good that you're thinking the way you are. Just saying, if you're in this frame of mind now, it's a good time to look at vlans. Think dedicated ranges with the benefit of reduced traffic saturation.
I have a zx01 or something like that from AliExpress with an N100 and 16GB. Those little machines are seriously impressive. It's running Garuda and my son has not complained once about any game he's tried to play. I don't play games, I just bought it on a whim cause it's tiny and $150 or so. I've run several systems on it without a hitch. I'm pretty certain it'll hose a Minecraft server without an issue.
I'm currently using Arch and doing the same thing. I learned more than a decade ago not to even bother with asking questions to the community at large. Bunch of self righteous dicks they are.
You can self host VS Code.