Which hardware is recommended? Trying to search through their list a ton of it is already on old-stable and seemingly ready to be eol-d. I’m not really interested in spending on new routers playing whack a mole with security updates every 2 years. I’d rather have poor performance and a longer lifecycle versus unknown likely marginal support window.

I use pf as the firewall on my server, what is the difference/reason for the opnsense fork?

They also list my current one as unsupported unfortunately, I think because of the Broadcom WiFi chip in it.

That was one of the things I was considering was whether running a router before the WiFi and then just using them as access points might be a better choice.

Realistically no. My wife primarily uses the ad blocking dns and smb file storage. I’ve built the server on FreeBSD so those should run near forever if I passed, and she knows she has until the server dies to find somewhere else to put her photos. Past that there’s a maintenance document next to the will, which includes everything up to how to replace drives on zfs, but I doubt she’d use it if I’m being honest.