just buy stuff you can put your own firmware/os on because it's either just the worst security in the world (aka anything not from china) or, well... china.

and while i currently don't hate china as much as i do US rn (because canadian; sorry) i can also say -- due to being an aforementioned leaflandian -- that due to very personal experience i have zero faith in anything from china that has the ability to connect to any type of network :')

And so yeah at this point if I can't at the very least get a whatever-wrt firmware (preferably a proper linux distro nowadays; not to say the *-wrt firmwares aren't a real OS but, y'know) on the device i just avoid them entirely since, well... it's all i can do at this point because even if there were baked in hardware-based backdoors i as an individual can't do much more than that.

That sounds horrible. I got an old PI4, would it make for a decent router, if at all possible?