Fingers crossed this makes it into 23.05.0 RC3
You are right, after finding this patch for hostapd it's clear that a number > 63 is used to generate a random number, but it's impossible to know without finding this patch.
I'm quite sure that the driver bugfixes will be included in 23.05. And if you are insane enough (like me) to use a snapshot or RC release for your productive network you have to life with such kind of issues (for a while) 
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@nbd I also tested your latest commit in mt76 repo on my WSM20 (WDS STA) and the WDS AP (ASUS RT-AX53U with an older snapshot version) rebooted after forcing 40 MHz channel width and when the Zyxel finished the reconnection process (I've set a trigger to the LEDs for the WDS STA radio at the Zyxel) - but I'm unable to reproduce it so probably a false alarm.
This info about randomized numbers was posted in the forum somewhere, but I cannot find it anymore. Sorry. All i was able to find was regular hostapd documentation, but it does not say anything about randomization bss_color. See here: https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/tree/hostapd/hostapd.conf#n836
So does this mean that ONLY numbers > 63 are randomized? What happens if they are < 63 and there are multiple client devices in the network and users have not specifically set bss_color?
Edit: PS, yes I am crazy enough to try snapshots 
But I decided to remain at a snapshot from mid April for now, as with the last snapshots I tried, I experienced laggs with my dap-x1860 (mt7621 + mt7915), which is configured as repeater using the relayd package.
r22573-72780e3eac (stable)
r22900-abec62a542 (laggy)
r23300-86bc525d00 (laggy)
There were so many issues popping up with my chipset recently that i was a little reluctant to try newer snapshots and wanted to wait a little until it all had calmed down a little. I don't know how to code so yeah...
Edit: Turns out, my laggs were caused by bad intel ax200 drivers from the Windows 10 client device. Since I upgraded to WiFi-22.240.0-Driver64, my ax upload instability has mostly vanished and it's all fine now. The Latest snapshot for the dap-x1860 I tried from 2023-07-28 (r23633-daaa0c1b25) was working fine for me. I do not use wds, but unfortunately have to use relayd.
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0-63 is defined as valid range for he_bss_color. If > 63 is set for he_bss_color hostapd will chose a number between 1 and 63 randomly (with OpenWRT, see the linked Patch).
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Today's snapshot seems to have fixed all my WDS(client) problems
Model Linksys E8450 (UBI)
Architecture ARMv8 Processor rev 4
Target Platform mediatek/mt7622
Firmware Version OpenWrt SNAPSHOT r23494-a41bded032 / LuCI Master git-23.158.78004-23a246e
Kernel Version5.15.119
Giant Thank you to all in the development teams.
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