I've been very happy with Ubiquity Edgerouters the last few years. Their ER-X model can do 1Gbps total... So if you're downloading at 500Mbps then you can upload at 500Mbps. It come in about USD 60 I think.
Next level up is the Edgerouter Lite 3. It is much beefier and can easily handle 1Gbps both ways and even faster. It's just under $100. 99 or so. Maybe you can find it on special.
They are really prosumer and definitely much stabler than typical consumer routers. Eg I haven't reset mine in more than 2 years.
It's not open source like mikrotik but they are very hacker and tech use friendly. Most things work via CLI. And most advanced router functions are supported.
Real life experiments: https://youtu.be/ZQdlFfSq1kw?si=XZiMVvPBxiZemYwd