While digging through /etc/hotplug.d/iface/11-sqm I noticed it uses what I believe is a deprecated option, ifname, which no longer appears to be supported.
The warning box at the top of https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/base-system/basic-networking indicates that ifname should no longer be used, and some experiments running examples with the grepped snippet above (in SNAPSHOT and 22.03) show that it's probably not working correctly there.
Yes it’s empty for me on 23.05 snapshot, but my wan interface is the same as the device name “wan”, so by the time it sorts unique values, it’s left with just wan anyway.
Just grasping at things, is it for virtual NIC setups, where there may be multiple device names for a single physical device, 'tun0', 'eth0.1' and so on, in the config? I don't have anything that matches on any of my routers either, but I thought it looked like a potential source of error for people with vpns or vlans on wan or LAGG or ???
In any case, it appears to be no-op code in 22.03 and later, so someone who knows what's going should give it a glance.