In what way?

HTML definitely provides more overhead than json if you only care about the data.

I always look forward to the penguin images on articles about Linux

What even is a neutral political position in that case? Doesn’t that depend entirely on the observers definition of left and right?

I‘m not sure if I understand your problem. How many VMs, hostnames, etc. are we talking about?

Jup, I use my pfSense as DDNS client with Cloudflare