I am sad, and ashamed, that you had to continuously point towards it being “a hobby exercise” - without which the only answers you would get are “change your VPS provider bro” or “you’re too scared bro”. Paranoid or not, these questions are important to understand and answer (network security is not easy when you get into such concepts), regardless where they are coming from. I am positively dismayed; aggravated even, that even in such a community where people know so much, the first thought that would come to their mind is “just trust them bro”.
That said, you are correct. The VPS can absolutely inspect your storage + RAM and scrape the keys/certificates. Considering that Cloudflare tunnels are much worse, I’d rather stick with a VPS, but the problems remain.
I wonder if LUKS can be used for the underlying storage hosting these certificates. Although, will that help if the RAM of the device is compromised?