It’s only bad practice if you don’t keep up on vulnerabilities/patching, don’t have any type of monitoring or ability to detect a potential breach, etc.
The nice thing about tucking everything behind a VPN is you only have one attack surface to really worry about.
I moved from technical, to management, did that for around 4 years and decided that was enough. Switched jobs (also probably way overdue at that time) to a senior network engineer, left after a year and became a network architect. I’ve done that for a few employers ever since and generally love it.
I just do this for money, I care about my work of course, but end of the day I want to shut down and forget about it. My current role lets me do that pretty easily.
Being in management that long might make it harder, unfortunately. But I’d totally recommend trying to pivot to an architect role if you have the skills.
That’s not true anymore. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-19-72A1.pdf