You can always funnel all your VPN traffic through a more typical port, like 80, and there’s very little anyone can do to distinguish between your traffic and typical web traffic.

If your ISP causes issues with inbound traffic to your home network, just add another link to the chain to include a cloud-hosted server, or host it all entirely in the cloud (if you find a trustworthy one with a reasonable cost).

152mm tall is larger than the Pixel 4a. Not. Compact.

Just a nitpick, while ‘brighter’ belongs in objective Pros (as long as the minimum brightness is as dark or even darker than the last gen), ‘bigger’ isn’t a Pro. People have different size preferences and we have spiralled so far beyond the smaller end of size preferences we’re actually getting into ‘too big for anyone’ screens if we go much larger.

FFS, reduce the bezel and keep the screen the same damn size. I know some people love big screens but it is hardly 100% of customers.

Recently switched from a 4a (literally what you just described – it even actually has an aux port) to an iPhone 13 Mini.

The Mini is a better size. Better build. Better standby battery life. Better performance from the A15. No fingerprint unlock is a loss, but FaceID is… fine.

I would kill for another Mini.

Of course, nothing wrong with it. In fact it makes OP’s quandary a lot easier! I’m looking into something with 20TB or so of capacity myself, and that’s given me an appreciation for how much simpler it is to solve this problem at 2TB.

2TB is insanely small for a NAS. At that point, you could honestly just run a Pi 5 with M.2 HAT and a 2TB SSD for something like $200 total. Could always buy a second Pi for mirroring and even locate it in a friend or family member’s house for mirroring and backup.

I use a Pi 4 with 7 TB of external SSDs just fine at home. It also hosts a pi.hole ad blocking server, my 1TBish jellyfin music streaming collection, my network share for kodi, an always-on VPN for my phone and laptops, and a few other small services. I’m sure I could upgrade for better read/write speeds. But everything is performant enough as is, and it’s completely silent and fan-free in my living room by the router. Honestly for most services a Pi with a passive cooler will perform admirably.