I only wish more of them were actually mainline openWRT so the updates from the project were guaranteed. There is a lot of these devices that run a custom version and never have their hardware support put into mainline. That isn't really much different to what all the major router companies do, they are all running OpenWRT underneith but with their own skinned interface over the top.

Yeah, I have several GL.iNet routers with OpenWRT preinstalled.

By default, it runs a custom shell, but Luci is easy enough to switch to.

Or Opnsense