[Ourgon]

I never rued the day when I switched off the last "appliance" router after switching to a virtual router - OpenWRT running in a container on a Proxmox-managed host. I use a number of repurposed "appliance" routers (also running OpenWRT) as access points, some of them connected to additional "dumb" PoE-switches for IP-camera's. Those camera's run over their own VLAN and never get to touch the 'net, the same goes for "IoT" things (heat pump, PV-inverter etc). Xi and friends will be disappointed, even if they built backdoors in their equipment these only lead to a dead-end street.