Yes. You're still running the native Tailscale client code on the hosts, which this evidence reveals can't be as trusted as Tailscale would like us to believe.
I also wouldn't trust Headscale fully. It had a critical defect at some point that, IIRC, would allow an attacker to rotate the key of a registered node without auth to a value chosen by the attacker. And its primary maintainer is a member of the Tailscale team, apparently maintained with full approval of their employer and with reasonable transparency between the projects, but nonetheless the overlap is a little close for comfort.
Frankly, as you've said, I don't trust any of these solutions to be anything more than a convenient way to jump onto a bastion or another host of minimal consequence to get into the network and jump onwards.
> Isn't Headscale server-side only ?
Yes. You're still running the native Tailscale client code on the hosts, which this evidence reveals can't be as trusted as Tailscale would like us to believe.
I also wouldn't trust Headscale fully. It had a critical defect at some point that, IIRC, would allow an attacker to rotate the key of a registered node without auth to a value chosen by the attacker. And its primary maintainer is a member of the Tailscale team, apparently maintained with full approval of their employer and with reasonable transparency between the projects, but nonetheless the overlap is a little close for comfort.
Frankly, as you've said, I don't trust any of these solutions to be anything more than a convenient way to jump onto a bastion or another host of minimal consequence to get into the network and jump onwards.