How do your relatives cope with remote access to Home Assistants?

Hi all,
quite possibly for people on this forum VPN, Cloudflare Tunnel or Tailscale are the daily bread.
But how do your loved ones cope? Are they able to turn something on in Home Assistant when they are away from home without your help?
My case that got me thinking about this problem:
We're returning in the car from holiday, I'm driving and my wife wants to turn on the water heater remotely. The internet works, HA works, but still a VPN and you have to have it configured. A text falls:

"I don't know what a VPN is. I just want hot water!"

And here are my questions:

- Do your partners/parents/children run into these sorts of issues too?
- What is the biggest issue for them with remote access?
- If you could wave a wand - what would have to change for them not to call you with requests?

Bonus for geeks: how important is a zero-trust approach and no open ports in this whole process to you?

I'm tinkering after hours on a small project to simplify all this, so any real-life stories would be super valuable. Thanks in advance for any comments and real-life examples!

The wife copes, provided she is pre-installed and set up everything on the phone. She copes so well that she peeps at me to see what I'm doing .
I think you can install a VPN to make the network itself and get up when the phone restarts, at least that's how it is on ZeroTier.
It is a maintenance free solution.

And after installing the VPN and autostart give the phone back .

I'm fortunate enough to have my own public IP so after setting up Wireguard on my wife's phone and a brief tutorial she handles the app quite well. My daughter doesn't give a damn about Smart Home and smartphones in general which even makes me extremely happy.

Thanks for your patents!

In my imagination, the thought occurred to me to include all the technology in some HA add-on that, when installed, would generate QR codes to configure trusted devices and that's it.

When it comes to onboarding, I haven't found a simple solution. But once relatives are set up, they benefit.