Welcome to OpenWrt!
I'd provide the same caveats @slh does, but would suggest simply setting up an OpenWrt VM as a subnet router to experiment and learn the OpenWrt environment and quirks. I've got OpenWrt on a bare metal x86 for my edge router, but add a Hyper-V OpenWrt VM providing an isolated subnet (the VM's WAN is just another DHCP client to the "real" router, a couple of Linux server VMs provide clients on a virtual switch downstream of the VM router). This lets me do all sorts of wacky/dangerous stuff on the VM router without any chance of familial strife. You can also do pentests and various attacks against the WAN side without upsetting your ISP, which is always a good thing. (See our thread on snort IPS mode of snort3 is not dropping traffic for some motivation there.)
All the usual advantages of a VM apply: if I screw things up too badly, just restore from a snapshot; if it gets totally out of control, kill it and start over. The freedom to change things on a whim without thinking "oh, crap, my wife is gonna kill me if I break facebook again" is really liberating.
Note: I only use Hyper-V instead of QEMU because I have more RAM on the Windows box than the Linux server... Either would do just as well.