sad, never a big fan of yast but appreciate a european owned distro

this sounds doable. i do something similar with syncthing. it depends on the internet connection speeds. see how it goes with wireguard. between two home NAT networks you might find something lile tailscale easier to set up. wouldnt recommend doing this when youre not able to drive over there and fix things occasionally. ethernet preferable for reliable connection over wifi at the remote end. if you secure the pi well and update it it should be fine. note that you probably need to trust the remote household with your data.

not a web dev. If I did want to make some minimal fast loading pages that don’t look awful, is there a decent framework out there that will do the styling? A bit of html is fine but learning CSS is just not on my to do list.