Perhaps you have reasons for avoiding it, but have you considered researching Wireguard for your VPN? It's pretty night and day the throughput you can get out of it -compared to OpenVPN.
It's also really amazing when it's used in mesh VPNs like Tailscale.
It's a legacy setup and it's working. I did some tests last year with Wireguard and among the problems I encountered were the lack of reconnection upon IP address change. I tested it with a couple of VPS and devices in the LAN, and for some reason it failed to work reliably, like for weeks and surviving reboots of random machines.
My setup bridges two home networks into one with two different subnets.
Long term I definitely want to use Wireguard, but for I'll continue using what works reliably.
Regarding Tailscale, I don't want to use 3rd party services for this.
If you want to avoid third party services Tailscale works with the community project Headscale that you can self-host. It's even gotten patches from Tailscale themselves.
https://headscale.net/
It's also really amazing when it's used in mesh VPNs like Tailscale.