vyatta and vyatta-based (edgerouter, etc) I would say are good enough for the average consumer.

WTF? What galaxy are you from? Literally zero average consumers use that. They use whatever router their ISP provides, is currently advertised on tech media, or is sold at retailers.

I'm not talking about budget routers. I'm talking about ALL software running on consumer routers. They're all dogshit closed source burn and churn that barely receive security updates even while they're still in production.

Also you don't need port forwarding and ddns for internal routing. ... At home, all traffic is routed locally

That is literally the recommended config for consumer Tailscale and any mesh VPN. Do you even know how they work? The "external dependency" you're referring to — their servers — basically operate like DDNS, supplying the DNS/routing between mesh clients. Beyond that all comms are P2P, including LAN access.

Everything else you mention is useless because Tailscale, Nebula, etc all have open source server alternatives that are way more robust and foolproof to rolling your own VPS and wireguard mesh.

My argument is that "LAN access" — with all the "smart" devices and IoT surveillance capitalism spyware on it — is the weakest link, and relying on mesh VPN software to create a VLAN is significantly more secure than relying on open LAN access handled by consumer routers.

Just because you're commenting on selfhosted, on lemmy, doesn't mean you should recommend the most complex and convoluted approach, especially if you don't even know how the underlying tech actually works.