Other than that I'm yet to find anything that beats taking a generic x86 or aarch64 that happens to have a miniPCIe slot , put in appropriate wireless modules and treat it more like you would a normal linux installation. Separating AP/router duties between two separate devices will help a lot to simplify things whichever route you go (makes little sense for the "pocket travel router/ap" scenario obv).

OpenWRT has some great extensions and luci modules, some of which integrate very well. If you don't need them and want to do anything more than a standard home network setup, I'd consider if the trouble with OpenWRT is even worth it and set things up from a base debian/rocky/freebsd/openbsd/whatever base instead. Things that can be super time-consuming to get right in OpenWRT can actually be surprisingly straightforward once you remove their abstractions. Especially with nftables, if you're on Linux.