I used to use DD-WRT, and Tomato, and Shibby's mod of Tomato, and Advanced Tomato, and other stuff. Somewhere, I'm sure I still have a WRT54GS that I hacked ~20 years ago to accept SD cards. It was a fun time in using inexpensive hardware in unintended ways.

At one point, and I don't remember exactly when, I just started using OpenWRT instead. It wasn't always the case, but it presents a very usable GUI straight away these days and it has a ton of flexibility for getting creative later.

At home I run it on a Pi4 that I bought for the purpose. It keeps up with my 500/20Mbps DOCSIS internet very well indeed. I've used it with a USB NIC to get dedicated ports, and also with VLANs and a managed switch instead. I just download and flash the card, plug stuff in, and configure it. No real issues -- for years, now. (Wireless is provided by Mikrotik access points.)

When something faster happens in my neighborhood (which may be very soon; I had a very brief chat with a dude whose fiber splicing trailer was parked across the street just yesterday), I'll probably want to move to something more capable.

That could be in the form of faster Pi, or an old PC running OPNsense -- or even stick with OpenWRT. No big deal.

If I really wanted a tidier package for light-weight travel or something, then I guess I'd pick something appropriate from glinet and put an official OpenWRT image on it.

For heavier-travel, I've got a kit with a Pi4, a managed PoE switch, and a backup Mikrotik box (that can be a switch or a router; it runs OpenWRT as well and the normal config is that it just provides more switch ports), and all this stuff is mounted onto a 1U rack shelf that is in-turn inside of a road case. It's meant to be physically durable and to include enough gear that if any part of it dies then I can replace that functionality Right Now without spending time finding parts in the middle of nowhere.

So, no: I would not buy one that was prefabulated. It wouldn't scratch my itch.

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For everyone else? Honestly, the regular folks I know who ask me questions about networking aren't into that stuff at all or they wouldn't be asking. They don't care about ultimate speeds, or latency under load, or any of those things. They don't care about running Internet services from their network, or services on their local network, and probably don't even have a printer to abuse if something goes awry. They're also not interested in exploring the bowels of their home to install cabling for PoE access points.

They just want decent-enough wifi coverage that they don't have to think about it, and then: They want to succeed at not thinking about it.

So for those folks, I've come to recommend proprietary multi-node mesh systems. It doesn't really matter to me which one it is, or how terrible some aspect or other is: They all tend to check the right boxes, they update themselves, and then: Nobody thinks about them.