Very true. I recently wasted days trying to setup IPSec on OpenWRT with no success. IPSec support is broken into dozens of packages without proper dependency resolution. No GUI support. Sparse documentation, and what little documentation is out there is outdated and mostly consists of sample configs rather than true documentation. You see, OpenWRT likes to break configs from version to version and the docs are never updated. You can't follow documentation from upstream because OpenWRT auto-generates the package's config files from its own configs. Which are sparsely documented.

"Helpful" forum posts mostly suggested to "use Wireguard" with a notion that IPSec is an archaic protocol that is not worth anyone's time to support, and the user is dumber for trying to use it.

Hardly.