Actually, pfsense kind of has a shitty reputation in the FOSS community and opnSense is preferred.

But I don't like the limitations of BSD systems in terms of hardware compatibility and performance, so I build my router using a plain Linux distro (Debian).

That's the first I've heard of pfsense having a bad reputation, can you explain? (I haven't used it, genuinely want to know)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...

wild read.

sounds like the core of the issue was that Netgate hired a weirdo, and then botched how they handled it when the weirdo got -- go figure -- weird.

and it showed how FreeBSD does commits badly and may not have any (or few) code reviews

honestly makes me feel bad about using netgate boxes -- what else needs to be fixed?