To be fair, the flashing they talk about is as simple as uploading the new update file in the LuCI web UI, and there's an option to back up your data, plus I th

To be fair, the flashing they talk about is as simple as uploading the new update file in the LuCI web UI, and there's an option to back up your data, plus I think it tries to preserve it by default anyway. Things only really get messy when you're too many versions behind what you're trying to upgrade to, or in the case of an update failure. You don't typically need to get out a flash programmer or anything. They want you to grab the new OpenWrt a bit like grabbing the new Debian Stable, but they don't want you to do the equivalent of apt upgrading any packages you have installed in between the stable releases (for some reason). It is kinda weird and not ideal but in practice I haven't had that many problems.