Well I could have splashed the cash on Ubiquiti stuff or similar . However a bit of
EBay refurb purchases and I've extended this quite a bit with 5 units dotted around the house . No dark spots at all and little if any dropouts or stuttering . It just works and the interface is easy enough . Got my smart stuff on a separate IoT network . A separate guest network as well . Copes ok .
Yeah I was looking at the ubiquiti gear, looks pretty, but I really hate the idea of either cloud management or having a separate network controller unit. On the other hand I have everything split into vlans, my PC is connected to my switch (also netgear) and is on a vlan with the NAS units and my RPi, then I have my work laptop on a separate vlan, with two wireless networks running off the access point. One is an open wifi network for guests/phones with the smart devices on their own separate 2.4ghz network and with a distinct vlan for each.
When I get security cameras at some point they will also all operate on a separate wifi network and vlan. I keep meaning to mess around with the QoS for each vlan and rate limit some of them, but I'm struggling to motivate myself to do so, I was also thinking about creating an open wifi guest network as well, but that seems a bit too much like work.
Like you I've gone for refurbs, but my router is just a cheap aliexpress unit running PfSense.