Admittedly I haven't tried the newest models, but my experience with Linksys hardware and either ddwrt or tomato was pretty bad. Run for a couple of days and then require a power cycle. Seemed like a hardware issue.
OpenWRT is better in this sense, but even there some people split into recent LEDE project: https://www.lede-project.org
Regarding bricking. Linksys WRT1900ACS is designed with that in mind. It has two partitions, and you always flash updates to another one, so if something goes wrong, you can easily switch to the other partition which will hold previous installation, using special on / off sequence. It's a neat idea, and more routers should follow it.