Here this is a decentralized network with a lot of existing public relays. But in principle a VPN can solve a lot of the same problems. It's just that commercial VPNs are not decentralized, and doing your own wireguard setup is a pain.
This allows you to provide information to an arbitrary person (a friend/coworker/etc) to let them access the thing without them having to jump through all the extra hoops of joining your tailnet/them joining yours/adding a VPN/etc.
Not true. Depends on the VPN protocol.
Sounds great to me, and would be a boon for self-hosting and decentralization in general, which is sorely needed considering how captured, authoritarian, and anti civil liberties every democracy is becoming. If I'm not mistaken, I believe I read a tailscale blog about them envisioning application layer embedding at some point as well.
