It definitely looks the part.

Although off-the-shelf breadboards are plentiful and cheap, they almost always seem to use the same basic design. Although you can clumsily reassemble most of them by removing the voltage rail ...

No VPN or exposing ports necessary.

With the ESP32-P4 not having any wireless functionality and instead focusing on being a small SoC, it makes sense to combine it with a second chip that handles features like WiFi and Bluetooth.