Quoting: iwantlinuxgamesi used to use X over ssh years ago...not sure how well it works in the age of wayland.

it would spawn a graphical interface from the remote node to your display, allowing you to use GUI apps from the remote machine and changes taking place on the remote machine...no need for a full desktop

The downside to X over the network is that you need to leave it running on the machine you're connecting from.

As soon as you close the connection the application lose contact with the X server and dies.

over the terminal won't work for me since I also want to be able to update my steam games (my friends and I also game on that computer in the living room), and check files, etc... so I would want a GUI.

to update things from my side: I have basically gone back through all the tools, and thus far anydesk seems to be working. It definitely did NOT work last year when I tried it, so maybe some patches have helped it out, or some system updates on my end. Either way, it's working okay for now, so I will continue on with it. If it stops working for whatever reason I will give thinlinc a try.

I found this recently when looking for a way to remote-play games without requiring steam:
https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine

You can use it to control the desktop too, may be useful for you?

It works fairly well for letting me play a game on my laptop that's actually running on my desktop.