It's also a poor solution for an "always on" solution since it's dependent on your home Internet/VPN/power working, which is probably true for your other client

It's also a poor solution for an "always on" solution since it's dependent on your home Internet/VPN/power working, which is probably true for your other clients too. If I'm running Syncthing on a desktop computer at home and a laptop with me on the go, adding a Raspberry Pi to the same home network doesn't really improve resiliency of the sync service. But if I have a server in a completely different location, it actually will.