There is definitely beauty in having a separate router device that chugs on just fine regardless what happens to the rest of your network. But I got bored with the constantly-churning embedded culture, bespoke OS's (sorry, OpenWRT), and VPNs generally want more CPU than what purpose-built "routers" have. So I just went back to the old way of using a plain Linux machine as the gateway (now virtualized, with NixOS and nftables) and couldn't be happier. WiFi AP is done by that same physical machine (not virtualized) and by two other amd64 machines that double as Kodi boxes. When you learn netfilter/iproute2, that experience carries to anything else you might switch to.