War and spying has been a thing for a long time now. I think it’s unreasonable to expect countries to not make use of their respective industries and enterprises to get an edge on each other.
The fact is that this kind of hardware is just very good for that so as I a costumer, I feel you and I think the best we can do is buy a custom hardware and install a custom OS. Like open-wrt.
But I will not complain of my country doing that because when I see adversaries doing it, it’s completely reasonable that it also do. In fact, game theory, mandates it.
I live in a country which has been spied on for years by its closest "ally". See Crypto AG scandal for more details. So in my case there's no "we".
Yeah, the most realistic trade-off might be installing OpenWRT and some tripwires to see whether anyone is trying to do something nefarious remotely.
In spying, there's no "we".
Sometimes your own government is the most likely to spy on you.
> Yeah, the most realistic trade-off might be installing OpenWRT and some tripwires to see whether anyone is trying to do something nefarious remotely.
I agree with that, but its beyond the reach of most people.
I think zero trust or low trust within your LAN is also a good idea. So is firewalling ISP supplied routers.
I'm neither from US nor from China, so I don't belong to either "we". So in my case no hardware is safer unless I design the board and develop the firmware on top of it.
Even then, I'm not sure whether there are hardware vulnerabilities baked in.