I went with actual NUCs since they have 3 year manufscturers warannty. I had to replace one if the first 3 months already. Mine are NUC 11s but they appear out of stock on amazon now, for the varebones $400. Next time I am thinking NUC 13 pro tall since it also has another slot for storage as well.

Edit for additional Ethernet would have to use thunderbolt port which itself supports something like 30-40 GB/s. That or there are lid / exansions depending on the model.

VPN would still work for iPhone I imagine. Small whitelist of DNS would do 90%+ of the job.