Yes, this all looks correct. If the router supports port forwarding it is suitable which this one clearly does.

Use a P2P VPN like ZeroTier. I use it even when I have router access because I’m hyper paranoid about exposing anything to the open Internet.

VSCode is great for this, but to do something completely IDE independent you could set up a VNC server and just use a client to access the machine. They work really well on local networks and are almost indistinguishable from your local machine on wired setups. Proxmox would definitely be more contained though so there’s definitely a use case there is that’s what you’re looking for.

I used to be concerned, and then I saw this video which made it apparent it’s extremely unlikely and difficult for ESD to kill modern electronics

https://youtu.be/nXkgbmr3dRA?si=lr7wIJa3KH6q1EHE

If you’re primarily accessing it from a single computer, you can add entries in your /etc/hosts file on Linux/MacOS, or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\Hosts on Windows.

Tutorial on how to do so.

If you want it to be network wide you’ll have to add a manual DNS entry to your router. Most routers do this automatically by device hostname, so if you set the hostname on your pi to pi.local it should just work.

Tutorial on how to do so.