From my experience with tailscale so far - there are so many different ways to have it configured well. If it works well for you having it on the host, then go for it. I have home assistant in a VM with tailscale and tailscale on the (windows) host. This works well for my needs and I don’t mind having it running “twice”

Two actually

I chose to set up grafana, mqtt, etc for an RV instead of home assistant. Little more lightweight for the raspberry pi 3 I used. Pulling together solar info, so we could see how long the AC would keep running on the road

I think I had a similar problem a couple weeks ago. Make sure they are adding the device to your tailnet, by default it adds the new machine to their own tailnet. I know I hit some kind of issue like that, at least.

Don’t ever run random scripts from the Internet unless you understand every line.

ISO download from Microsoft directly. Use Rufus to make an installer USB. Click the “I do not have a license key” option. Who cares about the watermark.