I was thinking it would be nice to have for backups, but maybe even going as far as mounting ~/home to be able to run from multiple machines. I’m really asking where to get started looking without crashing into marketing department nonsense and search engine steering bias.
I ran Merlin for a couple years on an RT-N66U. Eventually switched to Tomato and was much happier with it.
It died a couple years ago. Replaced it with a Unifi Dream Machine. No ragrets.