at Cloudflare scale, absolutely. But today? Find a friend that lives in a different legal jusrisdiction that you trust. Install Tailscale on a raspberry pi Zero. Configure it all up. Send it to your friend. Get it on their wifi. Set up the corresponding app on your phone. Connect to it and use it as your exit node.

Voila, VPN!

Won’t work if behind CGNAT or will be insanely slow. Even ipv6 is not advertised sometimes.

I miss the days when I could ssh to my computer with ddns.

This is something that everyone says and nobody does.

Do your friends do that?

The majority of people have no idea what is VPN or Tailscale and would be suspicious that you might be placing a hacking device or proxy for visiting bad websites in their home.

Some people also do run Tor exit nodes on their ISP connections, of course receiving tons of abuse complaints, but apparently it's legal enough.

So people may be willing to do it for strangers in exchange for paying the bills.

There's zero chance I'd put some random device from anyone, even a friend, on my network - especially if I knew that was its purpose. Sounds like a huge liability. Do people really do this?

Most people have no sense of security. They say yes to strangers if asked to plug in a USB device on their laptop. When I said no in the train to someone asking to plug their device "for charging", I was definitely the bad guy.

Just find anything plausible, for backup storage, or say, to share family photos with grand parents but it does not work on my home wifi because my ISP is blocking ports, whatever.

Random device? In this scenario you and your friends would have already hashed out what exactly they’re sending you and what it’s for, right?

It depends on the friend, but I definitely wouldn't be opposed to it.

Definitely. In the age of the internet where stupid 'legal'/commercial/whatever other restrictions are the norm it's the only way to guarantee access.