Apparently I'm ignorant about Tailscale, bacause your service description is exactly what I thought Tailscale was.

The main issue people have with Tailscale is that it's a centralised service that isn't self hostable. The Tailscale server manages authentication and keeping track of your devices IPs.

Your eventual connection is direct to your device, but all the management before that runs on Tailscales server.

Isn't this what headscale is for?