I can't recommend the tp-link AX50 highly enough. It has been rock solid and stable now for probably around 4 years. I don't remember ever having to reset it.
I recommended it to my friends when they changed their routers over, and it fixed a lot of issues for them as well. The ones who regularly used VR reported that the stuttering issues they had on VR over WiFi with their Netgear WiFi 6 routers were solved.
Have owned both ASUS and Netgear in the past and the experience was terrible -- the high-end ASUS router regularly bricked itself during auto update. So I bought a more expensive ASUS router for around $600, and you guessed it, it did the same thing just less frequently. The NETGEAR routers never bricked themselves, but across the 3 models we've owned nearly all of them would lose most of their throughput (around 90%) on a daily basis and would need a daily reset to get proper ISP speeds again.
I had a Dream Machine Pro for around a year before I moved it to my office to run the network in the office. Funnily enough it has probably been less stable than the tp-link router, but nonetheless the UDM Pro is still a great piece of kit and probably the last router you'd ever need if it's in your budget and you have a place to put it (awkward form factor for home).
Re: Open WRT I ran this around 3 years ago on a D-Link router that I had, and the stability was unpredictable.. better than ASUS and NETGEAR but probably leaning on the side of poor compared to tp-link and UDM Pro. It would randomly get slow once per fortnight or so, and would need to be rebooted. Sometimes it would panic and completely lose internet connection. There are plugins designed to reboot the router as soon as a loss of connection is detected, but why is this even necessary? It's annoying too. Drops all your connections.
I would just pick one up available from this list that matches your manufacturer preference(brand loyalty), desired feature set, and availability in the electronic stores you usually make your purchases.
I followed one of the solutions in the comments and removed /jffs/asd/chknvram20230516 and the issue seems to have gone away. CPU usage went from 70-90% back down to 5%.
Depends on your needs of course. If you want something cheap that can handle moderate usage in a house, I had pretty good luck with https://openwrt.org/toh/linksys/e8450 recently (the Belkin one was much cheaper than the Linksys brand one, for whatever reason).
I think NanoPi devices are neat little things. R4s has openwrt support, the newer r5s/r6s are still in progress but I'd expect them to get supported sooner or later. You can probably already find patches floating around for them.
Is there a comparable replacement company yet? The APU2 is nearly end of life, and while my existing PC Engines setup is trouble free, I intend to live longer than it does.
As far as I could tell, they were the only source of medium-performance boards with excellent open source support that didn't change the design every 12 months for no f---ing reason.
I have one of those small Intel based nuc like devices and run x86 openwrt on that. It works great on a gigabit ipv6/ipv4 line. I also replaced the proprietary bios with coreboot for complete security.
