Wormable vulnerability in a router is 10x bigger issue in practice than attacks that brick a router. By "in practice" I mean judging by the real world attacks that I know of. Hacked routers are used as residential proxies for criminals, for DDoS attacks, fast flux networks, credential stuffing attacks, and more. Bricking routers is rare (and very loud), that's why it's news on HN.

Many router malware families don't even try to be persistent. Even Mirai - arguably the most famous router botnet - is not persistent [1]. In case the device is rebooted, it just gets infected again in a few minutes.

It's very important that all network connected devices have an update mechanism, working automatically in the background.

[1] At least the original version. After the code leak people were doing all kinds of updates, so there are some variants that try to be persistent in some cases.