To be brutally honest, the best approach would be to return the card and to get a better suited one instead. While Realtek is -slooowly- improving, the driver situation is not great and largely ignored by OpenWrt; AP usage with these chipsets is another topic altogether.
Just to clarify, if you can get your card working (including AP mode/ using hostapd) on a recent (kernel v6.1 and/ or v6.6) general purpose linux distribution (the initial testing will be easier on desktop linux), using their in-kernel/ mac80211 based drivers (not staging, not some random dude's out-of-tree drivers on github), you could package the necessary bits and pieces for mac80211 (backports). If that works, it should be relatively easy for you to submit an according patch to OpenWrt.