I have always preferred TightVNC over the various other VNC flavours. It does only one thing, but does it well, with minimal setup and network requirements.
I have tried RustDesk recently, and the performance when it worked was nice. But I found it too complex to set up across more than a few machines, and ultimately unreliable, with connections failing without any useful error message, an unresponsive relay, weird certificate errors, etc… It needs a couple of years to mature.
I would suggest looking into using WireGuard to wire your various networks and computers together. It works very well most platforms. You can easily give laptops a road-warrior connection, so they always phone home. Then it doesn’t matter where they are.
No. USB is not designed to be reliable. It’s designed to be plug and play. Don’t plug and play with your data.