Just a heads up, you’re replying to bots

Regarding pfsense…

Pfsense comes with sensible defaults out of the box. Lawrence Systems has several videos about pfsense on YouTube. I highly recommend his videos of you want to learn the basics.

If you do go the route of a separate switch and AP, it’s possible to mix and match vendors, but it can be very cumbersome, especially for new people.

I have had great success with a pfsense box + unifi PoE switch + 2 unifi WiFi 6 APs. Definitely not a cheap option, but it’s been well worth it for me.

Serve The Home on YouTube has some good videos on some mini PCs that would make great pfsense boxes. A couple even had 2 10gig ports and 3+ 2.5gig Ethernet ports.

If you are using IoT devices, you should consider isolating them on a vlan that is separate from your other devices.

Assuming you don’t care about segregating your network, pretty much any consumer Wi-Fi 6, or Wi-Fi 6e router/AP combo should fit your needs.

If you are interested in a more feature rich ecosystem, check out Ubiquiti. I’ve been using a couple of unifi access points and a unifi layer 2 poe switch with a pfSense router for 2 years now and I’m extremely happy with it.

Is it only on your Firestick? Does this happen on all WiFi clients? Does it happen on hardwired clients?

SSD has no moving parts, so you can put it anywhere you want. Just move the SSD and put the new hard drive where the SSD was. Just make sure the SSD won’t short anything out.

You must have a lot of free time

This might be helpful: https://a.co/d/32jkRDs

Blue Iris may be an option for you. That + Home Assistant and MQTT allows me to send alerts from my camera to my phone based on conditions I’ve specified.