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’ve always set the CPE modem to full bridge and put a router inside that I can control fully. Then you can swap equipment at will if you need to.