Ubiquiti is awful, it's a cloud-centric ecosystem. The best "prosumer-grade" stuff is probably OpenWrt. If you need more power, opnSense or a plain Linux distro on an x86 machine.

Not entirely true. There's a local admin option, where your Ubiquiti devices never see the internet (well, except your gateway). You can then connect and admin the whole thing remotely via your own VPN. It's quite nice, actually.

100% this.

OpenWRT is trading money for time. It's fine to recommend to someone interested in setting up their own custom router, but for most "prosumers" Ubiquiti will provide a better experience.

It's worth noting that Ubiquiti provides local admin support, and that the Ubiquiti Cloud data breach was actually a false story spread by a disgruntled internal engineer in an attempt to extort his employer.

As a MikroTik user. Do not start unless you know your ways around networking. And if you do prepare some time to get used to it. Once you do it isn't hard but the onboarding and having 20-40 options for everything you can do is confusing.