There is definitely a shift away from traditional VPNs these days since VPN tunnels tend to be more open and permissive. You can obviously secure a tunnel and limit network access, but you are still directly accessing the networks and resources that you do allow, remotely.
I was running Kasm for a while and I really liked this approach to secure remote access. I could effectively spin up a Ubuntu docker image and access it remotely through the browser. Secured the web portal with my IdP which requires MFA and I would login remotely and launch various apps and desktops.
They are non persistent in nature, so once you log off and destroy the instance you would effectively get a new desktop the next login.