OK, looking into it more it appears that pinggy actually has pretty good options for adding authentication (I guess that's what you were referring to by basic authentication, not just the service being exposed having basic authentication) and based on that it does seem that it could be more secure than just forwarding the port if the service being exposed doesn't have built in authentication, and that would make me a lot more tempted to use it.
The article for some reason didn't explain that at all or show examples using pinggy's authentication features. If the article had talked about that, the assertion about being more secure would have made a lot more sense.
Agreed. It surprises me that many of these services do not either lead with auth or have it as an important secondary. For many, port forwarding is a pain, so it solves that, but the security IMHO is just as important.
It's a shame lists like - https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling - do not call this out. fwiw, the one I work on, zrok.io (in truth, I work on its parent project, OpenZiti) has that hardening and auth because we believe its vital.
The article for some reason didn't explain that at all or show examples using pinggy's authentication features. If the article had talked about that, the assertion about being more secure would have made a lot more sense.