SSH is not a vpn, ok, but what if you can turn it into one. Applications on your workstation are unreachable from remote server side, that is an app can't just open a connection to talk to your local apps.

Except it can! X11 forwarding does exactly that and I found how to use any standard ssh and allow to forward a websocket socks5 connection that transfers files and events and you can have rules to decide before socks5 make the transfer so it's ssh, but in may view, just the way it was always meant to be :)