I was thinking more in line with the actual ODM: https://aliexpress.com/item/32955679364.html

But it does indeed not matter, paying 50 or 100 more over 5 years is a rather small amount.

I run an apu2c4 at home, with 1 Gbps internet connectivity. It’s a two legged setup, one leg to the ONT, and one leg to the switch carrying dot1q tagged VLAN traffic. It never fails to saturate that internal interface and does that with ~20-30% cpu idle time. I also run few small processes like DNS, NTP, syslog receiver in their own containers, serving the home. The only time this machine struggles is when my wife is out in a library, coffee shop with good connectivity and her VPN traffic (wireguard) to home is above 200 Mbps and at the same time I’m downloading from somewhere that can feed me at least 800Mbps. In this case it cannot saturate the gigabit interface because CPU is too busy.

Linux 4.19 kernel. IPtables for packet filtering and IPv4 NAT. ~30% of my traffic is v6 without NAT overhead.

All true. It's also worth noting that with the recent arrival of Gigabit FTTH throughout the Bay Area (Peninsula and even down to Sunnyvale), typical consumer-grade routers can be the new bottleneck when attached to a real 1Gbps fiber line (for example, even though for the previous cable modem connection it worked great).