There's enough exploits these days, the only advantage of most of these things running on many years old BSPs

If you’re in the U.S - look into Walmart’s ONN boxes. They’re cheap and have great performance. Specifically the ONN 4k pro. They’re not even bloated with apps. The apps that are installed can easily be removed. In addition, easy to side load apps and customize.

The X96 Max Plus has excellent Linux support (S905X3, 4 core A53 @ 1.9 GHz, decent GPU), 1GB NIC, 4GB memory 1X USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0. It's what I'm eyeing at the moment.

They currently go for ~60 USD which steep compared to the pre-ram crisis prices but nothing crazy.

For comparison sake, you can find a few really high-end routers that are faster but most are a lot less powerful than this.

The CPU/GPU actually allows you to emulate a fair amount, up to N64, PSP and Dreamcast (but definitely with some compromise) so they function great as retroboxes as well.

They sip power and run great as a small homeserver. You can even use them as a NAS for media (that you're willing to lose since you won't be running any form of RAID with 1 USB 3.0 port).