i wonder if there's an alternate universe where home routers have (physical) plugins that an end user can plug in to do different server/cron-job tasks, like if you want a web server, or an email server, or whatever
home automation stuff kind of approximates this
the deep problem that this solves is that so many people have a laptop or phone as primary computer, and that won't always be on and won't always be internet-connected, so you don't want to run things off it. (this also seems like a common problem with a lot of "local-first" stuff, you need a consistent server _somewhere_)