Hmm, I run OpenVPN on both my pfSense router in Colorado and my Asus router in Illinois. These two sites have had a persistent VPN tunnel for over 3 years, because I have some cameras at that remote site to monitor it.
For work I connect using VPN from my home office, to a fortune 500 company, it's not uncommon for me to stay connected for more than a week, since the computer I use for work is dedicated.
My wife is connecting by VPN lately due to COVID so she can work from home during this time, but its a smaller family-owned company with small IT team.
I wouldn't think that a big corporation would be using VPN if there was a more secure option. For smaller companies and personal use, I believe your biggest risk is actually misconfiguration or using an broken cipher etc. The MOST BROKEN cipher on OpenVPN will still be more secure that port forward for these cameras.
I would agree VPN will be slower, I can speeds test over 800 Mbps on my home connection, and I get maybe 35Mb/s over VPN. However, I don't know how much of that is really just on the receiving end, since it takes more horsepower to go faster, and the company has many-thousands of VPN connections. When I had a 30/6 Mbit cable connection I'd get about 12Mbit over VPN. It might just be the resource demand is too high to go faster on one end or the other.