I used "regular" Luci upgrade to go from 24.10.x to 25.12.2 - possibly an earl(ier) build - not sure. There is a big warning about upgrading packages. Is owut safe ? It says it will update 19 packages. TP-link Archer C7 v2
Yes, using owut or Attended Sysupgrade in LuCI is a recommended way to keep your router up to date with OpenWrt.
The warning about upgrading packages is if you are blindly updating packages via the Software section in LuCI, or via apk upgrade, which does not use a process to update OpenWrt as a whole, I believe it just upgrades a package blindly, regardless of your configuration, which can lead to all sorts of problems.
Regardless, please do a backup first 