While I am a linux advocate for networking in the current day outside of hyper specific CDN use cases (a la netflix)... its pretty common for people to just virtualize opnsense/pfsense to take advantage of linux network drivers. Especially if their actual routing requirements are modest and dont require full use of the hardware.

Beyond getting support for devices completely absent on freebsd, quality of drivers, bugs much more rapidly squashed, and general misc features absent on the bsd side like NBASE-T.

This is the kind of low quality information you see on fanboy forums. There is nothing special about Linux drivers and anyone can go look at them. A lot of hardware uses a HAL and there is a smaller OS adaption therefore most of the code is similar across OSes.

Virtualization means you now have multiple layers of drivers and privileged code in the mix to add and amplify bugs, it can and should work but if you are doing this in the name of stability that is a bit curious.

The reason Netflix can do what they do is they have good relationship with their HW vendors, NVIDIA(Mellanox) and Chelsio. If they were on Linux, they'd need the same level of support.

I don't know enough about this level of IT to rebut this.

I use Linux for my router now because my server is NixOS, so I was able to consolidate my router into my server and turn off a machine (and thus save a little power), and I have so thoroughly drunk the Kool-aid for NixOS that I kind of want to put it everywhere. I run the latest kernel and I update daily, so I think most bugfixes (and hopefully security updates) will manifest quick enough.