I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don’t know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It’s a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn’t more popular/widely used.
I used to use it, then wanted more control, power, and functionality so I moved to pfSense, and later on to Opnsense where I am today.
Made the same journey over the years. Rocking a OPNsense DEC740 now and everything works well.