IT IS helpful. As of the latest stable release, OpenWrt exists on approximately three dozen platforms. You just got it down to one. So there's really no need to be abrasive.
Moreover, an entry-level desktop x86 router is very much a well-defined entity: Intel Atom (or Celeron, or AMD equivalent), 2 or 4 GB of RAM, four Gigabit Ethernet ports. Storage-wise, it can come with anything from a 4 GB eMMC to a full-blown SATA, mSATA, or PCIe SSD. Storage, however, is not critical for OpenWrt; in its basic shape, it requires measly 120 MB of disk space and doesn't do a lot of disk writes as it runs.
From here on out, a lot depends on your preferences and budget constraints. If you want something new, shiny, and with warranty, check out the Protectli lineup. If you like your new and shiny to be less expensive (and less warrantied), go to Amazon and see what falls out if you search for Qotom. If price is a major consideration, see what you can find on eBay if you search for Sophos (be sure that the product has either SG or XG in the name; RED and AP, conversely, are not your fare). You will notice that most of these options fit very well within the mold described in the previous paragraph.
Note, however, that VPN can be CPU-constrained (all traffic needs to be encrypted and decrypted), so the faster VPN you want, the beefier processor you need. If you look at the high end of the Protectli lineup, you will see units running on Intel Core i7. Commercial rack-mountable routers can go even higher, into the Xeon territory. How much processing power you will need depends squarely on your requirements to the VPN throughput, which you so far have not articulated.
As to NordVPN, they have a page dedicated to making it run with OpenWrt:
https://support.nordvpn.com/Connectivity/Router/1047411192/OpenWRT-CI-setup-with-NordVPN.htm
So yes, OpenWrt works with NordVPN.
Also, you may want to check out alternatives for the router software such as pfSense and OPNsense. Community support for them in the high-performance applications may be a little easier to come by.