Comment by __jonas

> In my mind Tailscale was primarily to expose local services

You might be thinking of tailscale funnel:

https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/funnel

Which is nice, but still a beta feature. Tailscale itself is indeed a mesh VPN that lets you connect all your devices together.

> If I do not want to expose local services but only protect me and hide from untrusted WiFi, would I better use a traditional VPN or Tailscale?

It does NOT by default route all your internet traffic through one of its servers in order to hide it from your ISP, like the type of VPN you might be thinking of (Mullvad, ProtonVPN etc.).

Though you CAN make it route all the traffic from one of your devices through another, which they call an 'Exit Node'. They also have an integration with Mullvad, which allows you to use Mullvad servers as an exit node. Doing that would be identical to just using Mullvad though.