I used Merlin in the past, but I kept getting a strange fault where after a week or so the wifi would drop with no data. Devices could see the wifi AP and stay connected but no data would flow. Wired devices were fine. The only solution was to reboot the router.

For now I will just have to stick with stock and run unencrypted.

DNS over TLS is already old, it has performance issues, DNS over HTTPS or DNS over QUIC are much more performant.