@jas @conservancy >Ethically this doesn’t seem all that different from encouraging buying an Apple Mac
apple's "macs" have digital handcuffs to prevent you from changing the bootlader software and apple doesn't really actually release the modified sources from the BSD code they copy, thus it's all proprietary.

Hopefully such router is free of digital handcuffs and it's possible for free peripheral software for the Wi-Fi card to be written, alas such hasn't been done for any 802.11ac card, let alone a 802.11ax card.

The MediaTek Filogic 820 (MT7981B) comes with 1 lane of PCIe 2.0 and I see there's an M.2 slot on the board, but I cannot tell if that's SATA or PCIe (thanks M.2).

If that slot does offer PCIe 2.0, via a physical adapter, one could just use a freedom-respecting Wi-Fi card instead - then the issue would be if the version of u-boot for it is free.

https://openwrt.org/_media/inbox/toh/openwrt/openwrt_one_top.png
https://mirror2.openwrt.org/docs/MT7981B_Wi-Fi6_Platform_Datasheet_Open_V1.0.pdf
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hanwckf/wax220-gpl/refs/heads/main/doc/MT7986/Documents/Datasheet/MT7976C_iPA/MT7976CN_Datasheet_1.2.pdf