I feel like I've wasted my time with jellyfin

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You essentially have three options for remote access with Jellyfin. The most secure is a VPN (e.g., Tailscale, Wireguard) but there are drawbacks, as you've encountered. The least secure, and NOT recommended, is port forwarding. The best option for most use cases is a reverse proxy, which gets rid of the VPN and proxies traffic to your server. There are a lot of options for reverse proxies, including nginx, SWAG (nginx + LetsEncrypt + certbot), Caddy, and NPM (nginx proxy manager).

A RP would replace Tailscale as the secure portion of your setup. You need the RP itself, a config for it, an SSL cert, and a domain to access the server remotely (or something free like DuckDNS).