OpenWRT still seems to be the sensible choice even if it is painful to keep it up to date.
I have yet to get openwrt to run stable for long, even though I have bought five routers for it by now (WRT1200 was the last). All of them have needed manual reboot at some interval where they suddenly completely died. I gave up and switched to PC Engine's APUs with better luck, but eventually switched to OPNsense on said hardware instead. Much better stability, though not quite as fast with VPN connections.
Until I got Linksys E8450, it's a WiFi 6 router and can NAT at 1gb on openwrt.