Consumer routers are just Arm chips running linux, a wifi card, and a network card with a switching chip. I have a little Intel Atom box that i use for my network edge running OPNsense, and it is indistinguishable from any consumer router I've tested it against.

I use a 10GbE switch that was retired from a datacenter, so the switching is as good or better than most things. It wasn't expensive, I think I paid less than $70 for it.

As far as network routing is concerned, I haven't been able to see much of a difference. iperf3 shows that two wired connections I'm getting about 9.4Gbps, which is well within any tolerance I need. The router that Verizon gave me only had 2.5Gbps ports so I can't quite compare apples to apples, but the latency was generally pretty similar.

I mostly just like the level of customization I'm allowed to have. There's no arbitrary limits to port forwards and I can install extensions or write my own if I want.