Totally disagree, but that's a given when it comes to package managers I think. I showed my coworker who was RHEL to the core some neat Zypper features and he was pretty impressed. One feature I think is cool that I don't think anyone else has is zypper ps which shows processes with open file handles to files that were updated. I also really like the way it handles conflict resolution and the same package in multiple repos.
Unfortunately no guide, just things I've pieced together myself over the years.
Cloudflare is probably the easiest and most intuitive part of the setup though, you can setup dns/proxy/firewall rules very intuitively, and I'm sure there are plenty of guides out there.
Here is my setup:
Cloudflare fronts all of my webserver traffic, and I have firewall rules in Cloudflare.
Then I have an OPNsense firewall that blocks a list of suspicious ips that updates automatically, and only allows port 80/443 connections from Cloudflare's servers. The only other port I have open is for Wireguard to access all of my internal services. This does not go through Cloudflare obviously, and I use a different domain for my actual IP. I keep Vaultwarden internal for extra safety.
Next I run every internet facing service in k3s in a separate namespace. This namespace has its own traefik reverse proxy separate from my internal services. This is what port 80/443 forwards to. The namespace has network policies that prevent any egress traffic to my local network. Every container in the WAN facing namespace runs as a user with no login permission to the host. I am also picky about what storage I mount in them.
If you can get through that you deserve my data I think.