Try exposing a paswordless SSH server to outside to see what happens. It'll be tried immediately, non-stop.
Now, all the servers I run has no public SSH ports, anymore. This is also why I don't expose home-servers to internet. I don't want that chaos at my doorstep.
Yeah, I have been thinking about hosting a small internet facing service on my home server, but I’m just not willing to take the risk. I’d do it on a separate internet connection, but not on my main one.
You can always use a small Hetzner server (or a free Oracle Cloud one if you are in a pinch) and install tailscale to all of your servers to create a P2P yet invisible network between your hosts. You need to protect the internet facing one properly, and set ACLs at tailscale level if you're storing anything personal on that network, though.
Yeah no need for public ssh. Or if you do pick a random port and fail2ban or better just whitelist the one IP you are using for the duration of that session.
To avoid needing SSH just send your logs and metrics out and do something to autodeploy securely then you rarely need to be in. Or use k8s :)
This is just FUD, there is nothing dangerous in having an SSH server open to the internet that only allows key authentication. Sure, scanners will keep pinging it, but nobody is ever going to burn an ssh 0day on your home server.
A few years ago a vulnerable compression library almost got pushed out that major Linux distros linked their OpenSSH implementations to. That was caught by blind luck. I'm confident there's a lot more shit out there that we don't know about.
"opsec" includes well defined things like threat modeling, risk factors, and such. "Things I have seen" and vague "better safe than sorry" is not part of that.