Always risky to be exposed to the internet. unless you can’t, you should look into using tailscale/netbird to keep everything within a VPN.

Terrible advice. Don’t disable those.

If physical security is a worry, enable full disk encryption and have a good password.

Yeah but the dpi on the mouse is crazy high and no one knows how to slow the pointer down

My personal journey:

• arch is annoying to maintain and whil it is mostly stable, you do get some breaking updates here and there. It’s not a bad choice, it just doesn’t makeuch sense for a headless server.
• Ubuntu server, just why? Works fine but why?
• a not headless fedora, worked fine but still annoyed me sometimes
• proxmox (debian based) works great, annoyed me to manage vm resources.
• headless debian. Just works, I rarely if ever encounter OS issues. The only downside is that not everything can be found in the debian repos, but there is almost always an option to add a repo for whatever you want.

My setup is mostly dockers so keep that in mind.

But really, if something works for you go with it. If you are looking to change, I would recommend debian.