Re: I think you are underestimating the potential security problems
Funnily enough, I have deployed Access as a front-end client to MS SQL Server/MSDE on LANs, it generally worked well.
I am retired now and only fiddle with this stuff - I had some problems with Monty Widenius’ and MySQL going into MariaDB licensing with a product that we developed that was mostly used by not-for-profits and government users; so we normally used licenced MS or open source PostgreSQL and SQLite. It was relatively easy to move from a SQLite DB to Postgres; and not too difficult to move from Access prototypes to MSDE/SQL Server.