Honestly, I hate the idea of having a middle man, but having tried and researched extensively how to make something like a direct tunnel between two clients over the internet it just doesn't always work.

NAT is a godsend for IPv4 exhaustion, but it's also fundamentally crippled the ability for people to host things or make things available directly from their homes.

Hole-punching is an inexact process due to the variety of different NAT types, some of which (e.g. Carrier-grade) simply do not allow that sort of connection. So there must be a middle man that accepts packets on their publicly available port and passes it on to another established connection. TURN/STUN (et. al.) exist but are archaic and do the same thing but with less accountability.

I hate it too but until we have IPv6 by default with user controlled firewalls hosting something in your garage without a business line is not feasible. Hell I have a 5$ a month VPS purely so it can act as the middle man to the servers in my home. At least then I only need to trust myself as the middle man.