right but if you keep participating in broken systems you'll just perpetuate them. gotta find ways out and take them... or make them.
that's not necessarily what it means. some things legitimately are easier to explain in person. ever try working out a complicated mathematical argument in an email? one can do it, but it's not pretty. in person you can write on paper, draw figures, etc., synchronously with your compatriot observing and even participating. it's not merely a change of medium from text to sound.
ultimately, you will need some kind of access to something with at least one port open, if you intend to host services on the clearnet. you could use tor if onion services will work for you. if you have ssh access somewhere with a port open (or a friendly sysadmin), you could tunnel to there and redirect incoming connections back through the tunnel. same thing with a VPN, if the sysadmin is really friendly.
I do as you, and run my own services for everything I use frequently except for email. keeping it all behind a vpn prevents unwanted access. I pay for protonmail but operate my own mail server for internal use. I have machinery to download messages from protonmail upon receipt and make them available to me, and to send through protonmail. so I'm doing both and using protonmail as the interface with outside servers.
... in case you don't know: if it's for resources on a private home network, you can easily add the CA cert (i.e. the public key associated with the private key used to sign your certs) to your devices so that it's no longer unknown and the warnings disappear. I know this doesn't answer your question, but it's what I'd do instead of using letsencrypt for private services.
your statement is highly dependent on where someone lives. I wonder what percent of people live within about ten minutes' walking distance from useful public transportation. I bet it's not 90% or even anywhere close. most people on Earth do live in cities now though, so maybe it's ~50%...?