Port forwarding is moderately simple but there are risks to just opening a port and not guarding it with appropriate firewall rules. This includes an SSH server if not up-to-date.
Whereas setting up something like Tailscale on your machine and on your laptop is exceedingly straightforward, avoids firewall reconfigurations, and Just Works™. You could then connect to whatever service you have running, just as if you were on your LAN. My only gripe is that you do need a Google/Microsoft/GitHub/Apple account or OIDC to set up.
In the long term, if you have misgivings about that company operating the coordination server necessary for this tunneling solution, then there’s always the open-source Headscale, which is a drop-in replacement.