I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don’t know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It’s a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn’t more popular/widely used.
If you pick decent hardware eg. Netgear R7800 you won’t have issues. I’ve units of those running OpenWrt at home and a few small offices running for years with a lot of clients and traffic and they’re rock solid.