OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices

I love OpenWrt.

But I wished there was something similar but for "big" (in a relative sense) devices. I feel lot of the constraints OpenWrt is based on are not really that applicable when you have hundreds of megabytes of flash and RAM, and that is starting to become a common thing for routers these days. Even their own OpenWrt One router has 256M flash and a full gigabyte of RAM. That is not all that resource constrained anymore. What I would love is to have something that would be closer to "normal" linux distro while getting the networking goodies and ease of configuration from OpenWrt.

I have the opposite complaint. I wish OpenWRT ran on low-resource routers like those really cheap TP-link ones. DD-WRT does support a few of it, and my personal opinion is that it is better optimised than OpenWRT. By the way, you should explore OpenBSD ( https://openbsdrouterguide.net/ ).