I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don’t know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It’s a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn’t more popular/widely used.
Just the capacity for network monitoring for troubleshooting makes it worthwhile. Not being able to SSH into Netgear’s firmware, let alone having access to tcpdump is an advantage right there.