I was having weird perf issues on openwrt with tailscaled being in the network path.

With netbird + direct mode, netbird is only there during connection [re-]establishment. I get much better throughput/latency with netbird on both embedded openwrt and desktop platforms.

But yeah, this netbird thing is seriously buggy. For any sort of multi-user setups, I always recommend tailscale, it's much more robust.