ArduPilot sounds like it could make high latency piloting possible:

ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost.

This was my first thought. I’m actually using this right now to set up WireGuard at my house so I can tunnel there from a remote location on several devices that don’t have ssh accounts on the target.

Next in line is ssh -D 9999 remotehost which opens a socks5 proxy on localhost:9999 that tunnels all connections through the remote host. This is especially rad with proxy.pac https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Proxy_servers_and_tunneling/Proxy_Auto-Configuration_PAC_file

And next in line is ssh -L 9999:target_host:80 (or whatever) which tunnels 127.0.0.1:9999 to target_host:80.

Personally I agree. I don’t use the SFF. OP asked for something compact though.

Lil Nas X totally sounds like it would be a valid answer here.

Get an old optiplex SFF off Craigslist for $200 and be done with it. Those things last so long, and since it’s commodity hardware you can replace individual components that break for not much money.

I had a boring manufacturing job with long gaps between batches of work, so I read every help file in Windows NT4.1. While reading them, I found a way around our IT limitations on which apps we could run, and learned how to write scripts. So I wrote a password protected launcher tool using a macro feature in a terminal emulator I had access to on my workstation, and then started reading the man pages in Unix sys-V.