I would recommend just using a RaspberryPi and host it yourself. I never had any issues and it was the most reliable way for me

I'm using OpenWRT and liking it so far, find a suitable router and have full control of your network

Do you have any other requirements for the router? Or just to be able to run a VPN? When you say VPN, are you looking just to encrypt your home network (create your own VPN) or to use a paid service? E.g. VPN client or server?

I created mine using "Edgerouter X". Wireguard VPN. But I don't use it a lot because I'm currently WFH.

I really liked this router.

Why do you need a VPN and not a reverse proxy and dyndns?

My setup uses some docker containers to:

1. Update my WAN IP with cloudflare every 60s
2. Nginx proxy manager to map URLs to services running on my host server
3. Port forwarding to route traffic to the correct container
4. Cloudflare zero trust or baked in app authentication

Take a look at Tailscale. You can probably do what you want using that and basically any router out there since it's zero-config in the router, you're hardware independent.