Same here. K8s makes stuff like this so mucb easier, since you can declaratively control traffic flow via NetworkPolicies.
And with cilum you ca use hubble to visualize whay traffic is currently happening, in order to figure out what is actually needed.
I also use Cilium as my host based firewall instead of ufw/firewalld.
Because fex/box86 have the ability to run arm binaries linked to x86 libraries, netting signficantly greater performance. In addition to other tricks.
https://box86.org/2022/03/box86-box64-vs-qemu-vs-fex-vs-rosetta2/