You can always just “opkg upgrade” if that’s your cup of tea. That won’t necessarily update the kernel-image though which is often stored directly on some MTD-

You can always just “opkg upgrade” if that’s your cup of tea. That won’t necessarily update the kernel-image though which is often stored directly on some MTD-partitions, so flashing the sysupgrade image is the recommended approach if you want to make sure everything is up to date. And it’s literally just uploading one firmware file to one web-ui. It’s not like it’s hard to do it particularly involved or time-consuming. If you’ve been using OpenWRT at all I’m kinda surprised you’ve actually been able to miss them. They’re pretty much front and center in the firmware download pages and referenced in every single release note, more or less.