Your public website / blog? Sometimes you want services that are accessible publicly, like your observability and logging servers (eliminates the VPN point of failure).

I like to believe that there are different use cases that play with different needs, I don't know your exact needs on the topic but it sounds like you have figured out what needs you have on a technical basis.

The idea is not really to never expose anything, almost the opposite or at least understand where on the internet different things live and be able to address them globally

I use it for dev & testing services hosted at home.

You could just as easily ask "what's the use case of a VPN when you can expose the service over the Internet?". Yes, publicly exposing a service and using a VPN cover similar use cases. But one isn't inherently better than the other, nor does one make the other obsolete.